The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation: Indonesia in the post-Paris Agreement

The 2015 Paris Agreement has put pressure on developing countries such as Indonesia to elevate their climate adaptation ambitions and conform to global adaptation norms to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change. The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting and the Nationally Determined Contribution submission enable the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Change (UNFCCC) to review the implementation of the Paris Agreement, including the Parties’ climate pledges. The Indonesian Government has set ambitious adaptation commitments to evade the naming and shaming in the international climate negotiations.
There are some peculiarities in the adoption of global adaptation norms into national adaptation policies and the implementation of Indonesia’s international climate pledges at the national and local levels. Rather than having a singular coordination line or unified approach to implementing global commitment into national adaptation policies and local adaptation actions, Indonesian ministries are adopting and implementing their own rival climate programmes and agendas. Two rival national adaptation strategies exist between the Ministry of National Development Planning (BAPPENAS) and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF). This competition leads to fragmentation between them in formulating national adaptation plans and vulnerability mapping. Contestation over adaptation policies also happens at the local level, where local implementing agencies have different perspectives in determining vulnerability and selecting adaptation programme locations. Moreover, adaptation interventions have distributed adaptation benefits unevenly, and some interventions have led to maladaptation.
It then raises a primary question of this thesis: What is the nature of climate change adaptation in Indonesia in the post-Paris Agreement era? The arguments of this thesis draw from information gathered in Indonesia through semi-structured interviews of 38 elites, five village heads, and 44 farmers conducted online and in person during the COVID-19 pandemic from July 2020 to January 2022. The fieldwork occurred in eight villages in West Java, East Java, West Nusa Tenggara, and Yogyakarta Special Region Provinces. This thesis analyses climate adaptation in Indonesia by using the political economy of climate change adaptation framework established by Sovacool, Linnér, and Goodsite (2015), as well as multilevel governance theory (Hooghe and Marks 2021).
Overall, this thesis makes three noteworthy contributions to advance our knowledge of climate change adaptation. First, it enhances our understanding of the nature of national adaptation politics in Indonesia by revealing the contestation over national adaptation policies between two dominant ministries, the BAPPENAS and the MoEF. Second, the empirical findings of this thesis provide evidence of the variety of representations and experiences of vulnerability observed in eight villages in four provinces. Third, it contributes to extending the dimensions of the political economy of climate change adaptation typology into five dimensions by incorporating the cultural dimension to understand the implementation of adaptation programmes in the global south.