Social protection roles in reducing risk and building resilience to communities in Indonesia - working paper no. 11
This paper seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What roles do social protection initiatives support disaster risk reduction? (2) What prerequisite conditions are needed to extent the role of social protection in achieving sustainable community resilience? Research is based on qualitative analysis in two rural districts in Indonesia prone to floods, droughts and volcano eruptions. The social protection measure selected in this study is the national program on community empowerment (PNPM).
This study identifies that at some disaster prone areas, the community proposes the use of community empowerment funds as physical infrastructures to increase community preparedness and to mitigate risks. While the program is initially a short term basis, the impacts of the physical infrastructure development is also able to protect livelihoods and thus increases community resilience. This paper suggests that sustainable community resilience from social protection programs relies on high involvement of community. Furthermore, this paper explains some strategies in the implementation of social protection to support community resilience.
Many rural areas in Indonesia are prone to disaster risks that pose threats to human lives and livelihoods. Social protection has been introduced at some disaster prone areas to reduce the vulnerability of the people. Social protection and disaster risk reduction have overlapping targets, among others, to reduce the risks faced by vulnerable groups, to tackle the impact of disaster, and seek to build resilience against shocks and stresses on livelihoods. While both social protection and disaster risk reduction are commonly designed for short term programmes, they have potentials to sustain long term community resilience.