I had an opportunity to submit a paper for this conference. ASLI is inter-university research institute based on the National University of Singapore. ASLI conference is one of the biggest academic meeting of Asian law scholars. This year, the conference was held in Kyushu University, Fukuoka. Next year is in Singapore.
I submit a papre titled “Recent development of legal system on disaster management in Indonesia and its function: The role of law to support sustainability of society under the disaster”.
Main part of this paper is based on the field survey in January in Padang, West Sumatera, and I argued that a decentralized and grass-rooted approach in reconstruction are spoiled by weak governance, lack of monitoring and checking by impartial third party (NGO etc.) and negative influence of traditionally personalized social relation (obsession to harmonious community).
You can download a submitted paper (draft version, not to be cited) and PPT presentation file:
Abstruct of paper is as follows:
Background:
Though disasters, such as earthquakes, cyclones, and droughts, are extreme natural events, the severeness of result of these events depends on vulnerability of each society, class, group or individual (see Wisner et.al.). From the experiences in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Kobe earthquake in 1995, we learned that not only a size of disaster or technology level, but the legal system for disaster risk management has much significance for preparedness, mitigation and rehabilitation of disaster (see Farber=Chen).
Thus, legal measures to enhance sustainability (or, to alleviate vulnerability) of society are recently considered as a key for disaster risk management by national governments as well as by international cooperation agencies.
Indonesia is the country that is often suffered serious natural disasters. Especially, Indian Ocean earthquake that triggered huge tsunami in 2004 forced to Indonesian government to review its disaster risk management laws. Then, the government promulgated law no. 24/2007 on disaster management.
Purpose of the paper:
This paper tries to review the recent development of disaster risk management laws in Indonesia. Between the tsunami disaster in Aceh in 2004 and earthquake in Central Java in 2006, there was significant change of disaster management, which is from highly centralized approach to decentralized approach. What legalizes this decentralized disaster management is the law no.24/2007. Then, the earthquake that hit Padang city, West Sumatra, in September 2009 is the first severe disaster after the promulgation of law no. 24/2007.
This paper mainly focuses upon the development of legal measures and institutions for disaster risk management after the law no.24/2007 through the field research in Padang and other Indonesian cities.
The main questions of this paper are:
1. How do the national and local authorities are institutionalized under the law no.24/2007?
2. How does the disaster risk management system provided by law no.24/2007 work after the earthquake in Padang? This analysis is to be done with comparison to previous disasters.
Method:
This paper is based on the field research in Padang, Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Aceh supported by the interdisciplinary research team of Nagoya University since 2004 and research project sponsored by the JST-JICA since 2007. The author takes charge of the research on risk management laws and legal disputes caused by disaster. This paper examines an actual operation of disaster risk management laws through interview survey to residents, NGOs, administrative and judicial authorities.