Working in Silos or Collabs? Multilevel Governance Perspectives on the Climate Change Interventions: Comparing the Case of Indonesia and Netherlands

Keywords: Multilevel governance, Climate change, Sea-level rising aftermath, Water pollution, Coastal area, Collaboration, Geographical governance dynamics
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Sea-level rising is one of the critical issues in climate change discourses, in which many projects have been delivered to adapt to and mitigate its impact. However, two gaps are not clearly identified. First, the discussion about sea-level rising is not yet interlinked with the water pollution that goes into the sea, which may affect land pollution in the aftermath of the sea-level rise. Second, interventions to cope with these issues are segregated between different levels of governance, both vertically and horizontally, which end up with incremental solutions with different actors' interests from the global to local interests, ending up with short-term focuses. This study aims to identify water-related interventions taken by “change agents” and analyse their interaction dynamics in a multilevel governance system. This study uses the social-ecological systems (SES) framework (Ostrom, 2007) to map interventions that are dynamically taking place to deal with environmental issues from 2000 to 2022 by using a comparative case between the Brantas river’s estuary in Indonesia and the Hedwige polder in the Netherlands. The cases are explored by focusing on the governance dynamics for coastal management aspects, revealing the commonalities and differences between the Global North and Global South situations, which may lead to a unique governance approach for each case against the “one-size-fits-for-all” approach. It seems that an intervention delivered in a “collaborative” interaction among agents is likely to have more positive environmental outcomes than the “silos” attitude within a multilevel governance system.