Risk and the Dialectic of State Informality: Property Rights in Flood Prone Jakarta

This article examines the implications of perceptions of an emergent crisis of flood risk for property rights in Jakarta. Jakarta faces devastating future floods due to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts, and the city has experienced severe flood events in recent years. State actors have responded with an aggressive infrastructural agenda that has led to evictions of numerous low-income communities. This has spurred a series of court cases, in which plaintiffs have argued that the evictions violated Indonesian law and specifically violated legal protections of autochthonous land claims. Based on an analysis of court and policy documents and interviews with key actors, this article finds that Jakarta’s crisis of flood risk has intensified what we refer to as the dialectic of state informality and has brought this dynamic to the center of urban politics. This dialectic is defined by contestation between two deeply antagonistic frameworks of planning action. On one hand, state actors and institutions assert their right to unilaterally define what is legitimate and just, and indeed to violate their own laws and regulations where they see fit, as necessary to address societal risk. On the other, communities and advocates argue that this assertion of state power has led to the systematic delegitimation and stigmatization of communities that do not accord with state developmental visions. This critique paradoxically positions informalized communities as proponents of the reassertion of the rule of law in the practice of urban planning.