DREaM - 09.03.2008,

Progress Toward Community Resilience To Disaster Risk

By: ET. Paripurno, Ronny So, Yulius Nakmofa,

 Tanty S. Thamrin, Djoni Ferdiwijaya

ABSTRACT This paper presents the empirical experiences of the collaborations of various organizations (PSMB-UPN, PMBP, FIRD and Oxfam) in develop the capacity of district governments, communities and civil society groups to achieve the progression of resilience. The multilevel stakeholders’ partnership is to address the vulnerabilities due to increasing intensity and frequency of natural disasters throughout the ongoing decentralization process in Indonesia. The declaration of Hyogo Framework for Action, followed with the momentum of disaster risk reduction efforts in the international and national level. The commitments have not fully translated into the local level. Decentralization brought new opportunities of decision-making into the district government level. Decentralization also brings challenges in the capacities (knowledge, skills, budgets, resources, etc.) to reduce the vulnerabilities, either as stand-alone disaster preparedness and mitigation measure or integration into the development process. In the other hand, communities are facing increasing hazards and vulnerabilities with lack of or limited capacities to reduce their risks. Local governments, communities and civil society groups are not go through together, contributing more challenges in the efforts to achieve resilience. Initially, the paradigm of disaster risk reduction of local government officers, community members, and civil society groups are strengthen either jointly or separately, through discussion, workshop, trainings, etc. Understanding of local hazard, vulnerability, and capacity is part of the capacity building to gained actions by communities and local government to reduce vulnerabilities. Actions are planned and taken by various levels. In the government level, the integration of DRR into the budget, institutionalization, and local government annual plan are scrutinized and advocated. The communities establish their DRR action plan i.e. the establishment of Village Preparedness Team and various DRR activities in their village. Both process, government and community level, was linked together through joint activities such as contingency planning, drills, monitoring and evaluation activity. While it’s still progressing, the last one year, we observed that working at both level of district government and community level has shown positive directions: (1) changed perspective in the government level with regards to DRR mainstreaming in planning and implementation of local development; (2) both government and community started to share information on DRR; (3) local government started to share their internal procedures as well as the challenges; (4) some community intitiatives and adaptation effort was accomodated and replicated through the local government development planning; (5) partners and communities have increased their understanding and broadened their prespective as to the government development planning procedures. There are still issues that need to be addessed to achieve better collaboration in progressing toward resiliences, e.g. sectoral planning in emergency management planning. However, these gaps are being shared. Both parties are willing to discuss and find the possible way to collaborate in the aims of reducing the disaster risk and saving the community assets. To continue support the collaboration between government and communities is essensial in gaining the community resilence. 

Keywords: government capacity building in Disaster Risk Reduction, CBDRM.