Interface between Disaster and Development: Local Economic Revival through Collaborative Post-Disaster Recovery Governance and Network in Indonesia

Disasters are an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in the world, not only because of the effects of climate change, but also because of the increase in human population and the diversity of human behaviours that triggered the catastrophic events. A form of real interaction between human and earth has been clearly represented by the study of disaster and development interfaces. Due to the unique lessons noted from best practices reports and literatures, a case of Jogjakarta earthquake in 2006 in Indonesia, has been chosen as case study to explore this topic, in particularly from a local economy and recovery point of view. Through the application of mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods, this research seeks to explore evidences as a basis to formulate a concept that bridge disaster recovery towards more sustainable development. Among others, social networking, descriptive statistics, content analysis and comparative analysis are applied in this research. The aim is to identify empirically the extent to which collaborative works and networks in recovery context can contribute to initiating a resurgence of the local economy after the disaster, and to further provide recommendations for path towards a more sustainable local economic recovery, general model and recovery governance platform. The most important finding of this study is that most process and elements involved in the disaster recovery governance platform proposed have placed the networks and core understandings embodied in the fundamentals of collaboration at the heart of a resilient disaster recovery study. In addition, the recovery process that empowers the local citizens to be more responsible for their own recovery, with special attention to social and cultural values as part of ten propositions resulting from this study, is regarded as the core element of successful recovery. Furthermore, the local governmental actors play key roles in the recovery of their local economy, supported by the central government, and other non-government actors such as local leaders, universities’ research contribution, private sectors partnership schemes, NGOs and international agencies.