Fixing the coast? Global trajectories of multifuntional diking and scales of territorialization

Abstract

Discourses around coastal transformations that accommodate projections of sea level changes on the coming decades include the emergence of innovative, experimental practices of coastal protection. Recently, terms like “nature-based solutions” or “building with nature” have also impacted on a discursive re-evaluation of conceptions of nature and “the natural” in such approaches. In an ongoing research project, we focus on two emerging sets of transformative practices in coastal settings, multifunctional diking and floating infrastructures. We specifically ask what kind of global actor networks support and shape debates and technicalities around seemingly innovative solutions in coastal adaptation, and in what form specific understandings of nature-culture relations are part of such global set-ups. In a focus on one specific multifunctional diking project, the Semarang-Demak toll road in quickly subsiding Northern Java, we investigate the emergence of this specific type of coastal intervention and its embedding in wider, long-term planning processes and interventions in the city, strongly related to the histories of city-wide planning practices influenced by international consultants and expertise from outside the municipality. In a political ecology perspective, the re-evaluation of the ecology, productivity and tenure of the submerged lands on which the project is currently being implemented is discussed. We specifically argue that the diking project can be regarded as national and municipal project of reinforcing territorial claims to a rapidly changing coast, while those claims stand in stark contrast to ongoing, individualized forms of territorial claims and territory-making by coastal communities that are faced with the submergence of once productive agricultural lands, settlement areas and coastal ecosystems.