It is easy to blame climate change for the devastating flood in Jakarta this year. However, the persistent and worsening flooding shows us that a deeper issue lies in Jakarta’s water governance that cannot be simply solved by technological fixes.

In 2018, the World Economic Forum declared Jakarta as the fastest sinking city in the world with an average sinking rate of 3 to 13 centimeters per year, three times higher than it was 20 years ago.

One of the identified causes was overextraction of groundwater, which accounts for 70 to 80 percent of land subsidence in Jakarta, while weak soil was another factor.

The city’s heavy reliance on groundwater is mainly due to a lack of access to piped water. Since it was installed back during the Dutch colonial era, the centralized water distribution network has neither served the majority of the population nor fulfilled their water needs. The current service coverage is said to have reached 65 percent, yet the piped water infrastructure still struggles to provide water to 50 percent of the city’s population, with the majority of customers coming from middle to lower income households.

Therefore, since piped water is not an option, groundwater is the alternative for the majority of the Jakarta population, which consumes 630 million cubic meters out of an annual water consumption of 1 billion cubic meters.

The problem of water access in Jakarta is not just a matter of water scarcity; rather, it is an issue of governance failure, which is visible in three aspects.

First is that the urban poor have limited access to clean water. Urban water inequality in Jakarta goes beyond the water distribution network, since unconnected wealthy households are also extracting a huge amount of groundwater, which exposes the urban poor in marginal areas to poorer water quality.

Second is that the rights and responsibilities of the stakeholders in Jakarta’s water governance are blurred. Ever since the water utility industry was privatized in 1997, the local and central governments have played no significant role in protecting public access to water, despite their constitutional responsibility.

Last is the decision-making process that is restricted to the elite, as reflected in the current remunicipalization of water, in which the water supply was reportedly returned to the municipal administration with only limited public participation.

Nevertheless, discussions on Jakarta’s water governance have mainly focused on technical issues, like the normalization or naturalization of rivers as a flood mitigation strategy. Though they were presented as contradictory strategies, they both serve the purpose of clearing riverbank settlements in order to restore rivers to their “natural” states.

Additionally, the central government has also started construction on the Giant Sea Wall, which was introduced under the umbrella of the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development program.

The project, which costs some US$40 billion, intends to build a 25-mile-long embankment that will block the seawater from overflowing into Jakarta.

Having neglected the underlying failure in water governance, such technological fixes are merely “band-aid” measures for the ticking time bomb of environmental catastrophe.

Moreover, while these strategies haven’t necessarily targeted the root cause of flooding in the capital, their implementation has nonetheless led to the forced eviction of residents from hundreds of informal settlements in the targeted areas, including along the Ciliwung River and the Jakarta coast.

As urban planning and flood mitigation experts have argued, both neutralization and naturalization require land, which has typically led to forced eviction.

According to the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta), 193 evictions affecting around 5,720 families and 6,380 businesses were carried out in 2016 alone, with flood mitigation as one of their main reasons.

Though the government has provided alternative housing for evictees, the Jakarta administration requires identity cards and vehicle registration documents that many poor migrants are unable to provide. The impacts of forced evictions are not limited to material losses and also incur immaterial losses such as social disruption and lost business
opportunities.

There is thus a need to shift Jakarta’s flood management debate toward a more constructive discussion that tackles inequality in urban water governance. The ongoing debate on remunicipalization could be an opportunity to create a more transformative form of water governance that goes beyond the public-private binary.

Water governance researchers have called for coproduction: the provision of public services through a long-term partnership between state agencies and civil groups in which both contribute substantially to resource management (see tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220380410001673184).

In practice, coproduction seeks to rescale the decision-making process to smaller spatial units to expand the room for public participation. Different approaches have been used to implement coproduction in several countries. In Colombia, the government and the public are coproducing a water management initiative, while in Bolivia and Malawi, community organizations are involved in water utility services through a coproduction scheme.

Since there is no such a thing as “one size fits all”, however, co-production still needs to consider the dynamics between the diverse stakeholders in Jakarta’s water governance.

Yet, as a concept, coproduction indeed provides a base for developing a scheme that allows for substantial public participation in Jakarta’s water governance, something which is currently lacking.

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Researcher, Center for World Trade Studies, Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Yogyakarta

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