Inundated Landscape and the Production of Flooding Disasters in eastern Indonesia

Keywords: Floods, Integrated Science, Disaster,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

Climate-induced displacement is attracting increasing media, state, and scholarly attention,
including in eastern Indonesia where both climate predictions and dominant representations of
recent extreme flood events tend to locate such events as both novel and abrupt. This talk
instead emphasizes contemporary flooding disasters and displacements as a conjunctural
outcome of processes and politics long-in-the-making. We utilize a critical physical geographical
approach to do so, thinking across both hydro-social and socio-hydrological scholarship to
explore how distinct hydro-social regimes (colonial, developmentalist, and neoliberal) have
contributed to the increased periodicity and severity of flood events in the lowlands of the
Konawe’eha River of Southeast Sulawesi. Drawing on ethnographic and geospatial analysis, as
well as historical and archival data, we explore how these regimes have separated rivers from
their floodplains and people from historical repertoires of response to flooding through policies
of agrarian resettlement and restructuring that have animated swamp and wetland loss,
agricultural intensification, and river channelization for over a century. The result, we argue, is
not a flood-prone, climate-prone, or disaster-prone landscape. It is a landscape actively
inundated by historical and ongoing development trajectories in ways that increasingly converge
to force flood waters in and people out.