Investigating resilience in post-disaster, post-conflict Indonesia: governance, social networks and subjective wellbeing

This thesis starts from the premise that examining resilience from a socio-economic perspective is far from complete. Economics needs to narrow the gap with other social sciences such as geography and social psychology that are contributing extensively to the resilience debate. This thesis focuses on post-disaster, post-conflict Indonesia and adopts a political and cultural economy framework to investigate resilience as a multi-scale, multi-layered and multi-component process, across the urban and rural gradients. Such an approach allows us to link the analysis of key notions from social-ecological systems thinking, such as redundancy, adaptive capacity, and transformation, with key concepts in economics, notably polycentricity, formal and informal institutions, identities, social capital, networks and subjective wellbeing. The empirical analysis of the two Indonesian case studies - namely Nias and Aceh - shows that: i) at system level, the newly created Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) governance architecture has a weak degree of policentricity, failing to engage local actors and keeping a top-down approach to disaster management; ii) at the community level, ethnicity, religion and gender play a key role in creating closely-knit sub-groups, represented by different opinion leaders who often compete with each other to gain access to resources, with a negative effect on trust and cooperative relationships; iii) at the individual level, living in a more or less cooperative and trustworthy environment has an impact on subjective wellbeing and thus influences what people value as important for their quality of life after major events such as disasters and conflicts