Evolution of Community-Based Water Environmental Governance in Surabaya City

Abstract

Promoting local initiatives in participatory environmental governance to improve water quality would ensure more effective success and sustainable. The problem within local initiative in Indonesia, however, is that poor who should become active actors in their developments are often beyond easy reach. Within the Indonesian decentralization policy with such ambiguities, the participatory process has descended into an arena for predatory politics which make a gap between macro and micro level of water environmental governance. The papers will take advantage of the possibility for a critical perspective afforded by a local initiative to attain the right to clean water as poverty reduction strategies in the shaping of specific developmental intervention by donor. In particular, a primary role is played by processes of “collective learning” which result in a “socialized” growth of knowledge and embedded not only in the internal culture of local community but, particularly, for the private sectors. Pilot testing the use of a participatory assessment in Kampong Rungkut Lor, Surabaya is designed to promote specific measures of design and implementation that take better account of participation, community demand, gender, and poverty perspectives.