The ‘hazardscape’

The ‘hazardscape’ farmework has been applied in various disaster and vulnerability studies. Cutter et al. (2000) define the hazardscape as ‘the interplay of social, political, and economic factors – interacting separately, in combination with one another, and with the physical environment – [that] creates a mosaic of risks and hazards that affect people and the places they inhabit’ (p. 716). The hazardscape is closely aligned to the ‘hazards of place’ model that studies the distributive patterns of hazards and their underlying processes (Paul, 2011). The term ‘hazardscape’ has been applied in various studies, including a discussion of the place-based characteristics of volcanic hazards in Vanuatu and Hawaii (Cronin et al., 2004; Gregg et al., 2004), and a study of physical and perceived vulnerability to a range of hazards in Wellington, New Zealand (Khan et al., 2012). Furthermore, a modification of the term hazardscape to ‘waterscape’ has been used to describe the gender dynamics of flood hazard in Bangladesh (Sultana, 2010). While all of these studies acknowledge the role of place and perception in the construction of disasters, it was Mustafa (2005), and later Collins (2009), who expanded the hazardscape concept to include the contestation of power relations in hazardous geographies.

Using floodplain management in urban Pakistan as a case study, Mustafa (2005) argues that vulnerability is also a function of how ‘hazardous

geographies are viewed, constructed and reproduced by the expert/technocratic discourses about them’ (p. 566). Governments and donors exert power over social spaces and the contestation of this power also produces conditions of vulnerability (Mustafa, 2002, 2005). This argument is also demonstrated in Collins’ (2009) study of the production of unequal flood risks at the US-Mexico border, wherein he argues that ‘unequal risk is contingent upon how hazards are differentially perceived, represented, and contested in social spaces’ (p. 589). Without explicit reference to the term ‘hazardscape’, various other authors have acknowledged that political narratives and power relations contribute to the construction of vulnerability. These include Bankoff (2001), Gould et al. (2016) and as will be discussed in the proceeding section on territorialisation, Rebotier (2012). Gould et al. (2016) studied disaster politics following the 2010 Chile earthquake, arguing that different representations of state-nature relations reinforced top-down and technocratic disaster reconstruction efforts. These representations reinforced the role of the state as a manager of an unpredictable and uncontrollable nature, and a financer of neoliberal development investments (Gould et al., 2016). Bankoff (2001) argues that vulnerability is a Western discourse used to render large areas of the world ‘unsafe’, justifying certain scientific and technocratic interventions into these so-called ‘inferior’ regions.

By acknowledging the impact political representations have on conditions of vulnerability, Mustafa (2005) and Collins’ (2009) interpretation of the hazardscape provides a framework to capture the politics of vulnerability. This approach responds to both Middleton and O’Keefe (1998) and Watts’ (1997) critique of political ecology and disaster studies and their tendency to omit the political causes of vulnerability. In Indonesia, a key process involved in building political framings of risk involves the state-identification of ‘hazardous’ land. As I will describe below, the concept of territorialisation can help explain how the state seeks to define and manage these geographic spaces, with often over-arching political purposes.

The territorialisation of natural resources and hazardous land

Sack (1986) defines territoriality as ‘the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’ (p. 19). The concept arose in the political ecology literature to describe the process through which the state gains ‘control over natural resources and the people who use them’ (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995, p. 385). This form of territorialisation, which relies on the making of spatial boundaries, has been ongoing rapidly in Southeast Asian since the nineteenth century and in parallel with colonialism and the emergence of modern states. This process of spatial territorialisation is also driven by political framings of risk in hazardous geographies. For example, Rebotier’s (2012) work in Latin America demonstrates that risk is both a material and discursive construction. The ‘territorialisation of risk’ framework presented in this study argues that territories are ‘spaces where competing social meanings and identification are ascribed’ (Rebotier, 2012, p. 391). By recognising the role of the state in making representations of, and claims to, hazardous land, I posit that the concept of internal territorialisation can also inform the hazardscape.

The geographical concept of territorialisation has been most widely described in Indonesia through the making of ‘political forests’ (Peluso, 2005; Peluso, 1992; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001; Wadley, 2003). Peluso and Vandergeest (2001) define this form of territorial control as, ‘the process by which governments demarcated specific territories as forest land, [and] claimed all resources in these territories as state property under the jurisdiction of a forestry department or its institutional equivalent’ (p. 675). However, by overlooking local land tenure and land use conditions this form of territorialisation can increase local conditions of vulnerability (Kumar and Kerr, 2013). Various authors have demonstrated that these territories are not just imposed from governments, but can also emerge locally within resource management sites (Corson, 2011; Peluso, 2018). The local contestation of government defined territories has been described for the management of forests in the Dominican Republic (Holmes, 2014), Vietnam, (Sowerwine,

2004), and Kalimantan, Indonesia (Peluso, 2005; Wadley, 2003). The contestation of these territories is also illustrated in the disaster literature through Donovan et al. (2012c) who discuss the contested ‘safe zone’ on Montserrat, arguing that the making of boundaries is the result of a process of struggle and negotiation between expert and local actors.

While studies of the internal territorialisation of natural resources are widely found within the political ecology literature, excluding the work of Donovan et al. (2012c) and Rebotier (2012), the concept and analytical approach is underutilised within disaster studies. As much of disaster management relies on the spatial delineation of hazardous land, there is a need for more studies that examine how space and territory are constructed and the impact this has on recipient communities. This approach is particularly useful at the sites of volcanoes throughout Java, where in the past the state has enacted transmigration as a mechanism to shift people away from hazardous geographies (Dove, 2010; Laksono, 1988). Furthermore, this issue has contemporary relevance when considering the prolonged evacuation of communities from Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra and Mount Agung in Bali. The contribution the theory of territoriality provides to my explanation of the Dieng Plateau’s hazardscape is presented in Chapter 5.