Resilience governmentality: Rationality, apparatus, and subjectivity in building urban resilience in Indonesia

Abstract

There is a growing recognition of the need to apply the concept of resilience to govern cities and their urban populations with regard to the risks associated with climate change. Whilst resilience has expansively attracted urban policymakers, practitioners and scholars, this study focuses on resilience not as a ‘ready-made’ or ‘pre-existing’ object but as a relational object for which a more detailed understanding is required. Rather than seeing resilience through its linearity, this study alternatively seeks to understand the premise and assumptions behind resilience planning and consequent actions. This study aims to analyse the actual rationalities and techniques for governing the cities and their urban populations in relation to climate change risks in two Indonesian cities, namely Bandar Lampung and Semarang. This study focuses on how efforts to build urban climate change resilience function as a distinctive form of governmentality.

This study analyses how particular mentalities are invested in the process of governing through a set of rationality, apparatus, and subjectivity by using governmentality as an analytical toolbox. The data collection involved conducting semi-structured interviews and observations, as well as collecting reports and policy documents. It focuses on two cities in Indonesia that were members of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN). The findings of this study suggest that (i) Building urban climate change resilience is problematised upon a multitude of rationalities of anticipation, reactivity, and survival; (ii) Resilience becomes a regime of practices that emerges into an assemblage of knowledge, actors, institution and network, and (iii) In both cities, “Climate Human” is exemplified as a multiplicity of urban subjectivities in the form of survival and adaptable subjects. Resilience governmentality emerges as a new approach for governing cities and their urban populations from climate change risks. Resilience is not apolitical. It is embedded within the governmentalisation of specific knowledge-power and politics of urban life.