Building adaptive capacity through (trans-) local social capital – sea level rise and resilience of coastal communities and households in selected Indonesian second-tier cities (SeaLevel_TRANSOCAP II)

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The proposed research project (TRANSOCAP II) shall study coastal communities in second-tier cities in Indonesia which due to their geographical exposition and their specific social contexts are highly vulnerable to seal level rise and coastal hazards. Social capital becomes a decisive resource for successful adaptation of local communities and households when governments and administrations lack the resources to adequately cope with natural disasters and environmental change. Our overarching hypothesis is that through networks of trust and mutual support, communities and individual households are able to organise access to loans, remittances, information, and know-how. These assets have the potential to become valuable resources for disaster recovery, community adaptation, and long-term responses to natural hazards. The main research question of this proposal is: How are (trans-) local social networks formed, and how does the resulting social capital function as a resource in collective adaptation of local communities in socially and culturally diverse second-tier cities against flooding and sea level rise? The project aims to answer this question by conceptualising social capital also as a translocal phenomenon and thus contributing to overcoming the often limited ‘localised’ view of social capital in hazard and climate change research. Adding a translocal perspective to social capital allows us to investigate not only social networks at one location (bonding ties), but to include bridging and linking ties that can extend over larger geographical scales. In the first funding period, TRANSOCAP has been focussing on Jakarta in West Java, and Semarang and adjacent rural areas in Demak and Kendal in Central Java. We now intend to expand our study areas to other Indonesian islands and thus to other and very diverse socio-cultural (and institutional) contexts. The chosen study areas are three fast growing second-tier cities: Surabaya in East Java, Denpasar on Bali, and Padang in West Sumatra. These urban study areas have been selected based on the different socio-cultural contexts they are located in. The underlying hypothesis of TRANSOCAP II is that the chosen study areas have different social structures (e.g. family-based systems vs. neighbourhood-based ones and sedentary vs. migratory traditions) which favour the formation of different forms of social capital (local vs. translocal and bonding vs. bridging and linking ties). The proposed project also aims at studying the structure of social networks in more detail than the first TRANSOCAP project. TRANSOCAP II follows a mixed-methods social science approach, consisting of FGDs, a quantitative household survey, a subsequent network analysis, and expert workshops.