House lawmakers initiated the national disaster bill last year in response to what it perceived to be weaknesses in mitigation efforts and their legal framework, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of natural disasters that swept the nation over the past year.

But politicians have instead focused on taking issue with the state’s insistence on not mentioning the BNPB nomenclature in the draft legislation, as well as its decision to omit provisions on the state budget allocation.

Speaking at a virtual hearing with Social Affairs Minister Tri “Risma” Rismaharini on Monday, the deputy chairman of House Commission VIII overseeing social affairs, Ace Hasan Syadzily, said the commission was pushing for the bill to include “explicit and rigorous mention of the BNPB”.

He said it was to ensure the commission would be able to strengthen the BNPB’s authority instead of weakening it.

Meanwhile, Risma reaffirmed that the government had decided to leave out the issue of nomenclature from the inventory of problems (DIM) used for deliberating the bill.

She said it was unnecessary to mention the institution’s nomenclature in the legislation “to ensure flexibility in adapting to future changes in the government’s needs and conditions for development”.

As it relates to the BNPB, the former Surabaya mayor said the agency’s task of coordinating and executing mitigation measures would be prescribed in a presidential regulation.

Risma also pointed out that it was unnecessary to include a specific provision prescribing state budget allocation for disaster management to avoid mandatory spending and allow for fiscal flexibility.

The House working committee set up to deliberate the bill had requested a minimum of 2 percent in state and regional budget allocation for disaster management.

The suggestion was still being discussed internally among relevant government agencies.

Read also: House, govt set to revise disaster law in light of pandemic

“The House and the government have yet to reach an agreement on the institutional nomenclature for the BNPB and its budget allocation,” Ace concluded at the end of the meeting, as quoted by Kompas.com.

But Monday’s impasse was not the first time the executive and legislative branches have been at loggerheads over the bill’s deliberation.

Last September, when deliberations first commenced and the House had just set up its working committee, Risma’s predecessor, disgraced former minister Juliari Batubara, also insisted on not putting the issue of nomenclature up for debate. Unlike Risma, however, he insisted on including a mandatory state budget allocation in the draft bill.

Ace, a Golkar lawmaker, also said at the time that the revision of the 2007 law was picked up in order to strengthen the BNPB so that it would be able to “perform optimally to mitigate disasters in Indonesia”.

In a subsequent hearing in November, which featured representatives from the Home Ministry and the Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry, Commission VIII chairman Yandri Susanto claimed that a consensus was reached to include the BNPB nomenclature in the DIM, even as he acknowledged that the Social Affairs Ministry would still have a say as the leading government institution on the matter.

The argument came full circle on Monday as Risma refused to take issue with the nomenclature’s exclusion.

Situated on the Pacific Ring of Fire at the meeting point of two oceans, Indonesia is prone to natural disasters all year round, whether earthquakes, tropical storms, volcano eruptions, flooding or landslides.

COVID-19 has only served to exacerbate existing gaps in Indonesia’s disaster preparedness, including excessive red tape, overstretched resources and overlaps in authority.

The government has been keen to deregulate many sectors in an effort to attract more investment for national development, but in the meantime, the lack of a clear chain of command has thrown disaster governance into disarray. As a solution, researchers have established that there is merit in strengthening the BNPB.

Read also: Indonesia braces for more weather disasters. Climate crisis will make them worse

The SMERU Research Institute, in a research note issued last August, urged the government to revise the 2007 Disaster Mitigation Law and strengthen the BNPB’s chain of command and authority.

In its executive summary, researchers said the need to revise the law was discernible from the “messy” policies enacted in response to the pandemic, including in data collection, the distribution of social assistance and the slow appointment of COVID-19 test laboratories.

“As the lead executor of the COVID-19 response, the BNPB does not in fact have enough authority to resolve those issues. The chain of command and coordination in disaster mitigation should be strong and steady so that governance in disaster management can be more adaptive,” the SMERU research team said.

As part of the law’s revision, SMERU highlighted three points for improving on the current disaster mitigation system: clearer status on scope and authority among multiple state institutions in mitigating disasters; stronger authority for the BNPB to deploy strategic resources; and more authority to the BNPB to design a coherent structure for disaster management, from the central government all the way out to the regions.

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