Translocal social capital as a resource for community-based responses to coastal flooding – Evidence from urban and rural areas on Java, Indonesia

Abstract

Social capital is used widely by households in the Global South as a collective response mechanism to natural hazards. It is argued that these processes serve as substitutes for scarce financial and human capital in poor communities. To date, the majority of studies on social capital in the Global South has framed these processes in place-based ways, assuming that they are developed and deployed within local spaces. However, in an increasingly globalized world, people’s social networks increasingly transcend the local, and social capital is therefore manifested in multi-scalar geographies. The aim of this study is to assess the significance of this translocality for the use of social capital in responding to natural hazards. Using evidence from communities under threat of sea-water inundation in rural and urban areas in North Java, we focus on both the outcomes of translocal social capital for hazard adaptation and the origins of these social ties. Our results show that households with a higher number of translocal contacts are more likely to take proactive measures against flooding and subsidence. Furthermore, we found that the conditions for establishing translocal social capital differ between rural and urban areas, and we show that the propensity for translocal social capital is stratified along economic lines. Poorer households have fewer translocal social ties, which impairs their ability to adapt to environmental threats. Thus, our results contest former assumptions about (translocal) social capital being a prime resource for the poor. The paper concludes that interventions in poor communities designed to enhance translocal social capital may offer answers to this problem.