Maladaptation on the Waterfront: Jakarta’s Growth Coalition and the Great Garuda

The capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta, faces chronic flooding which has been and will continue to be exacerbated by climate change processes, including sea level rise and increased rainfall. In response to these threats, the government has devised a megaproject solution to flooding which will simultaneously address the problem while enhancing Jakarta’s status as a ‘world city’, improving the economy of the metropolitan region and the country as a whole. However, the so-called Great Garuda project has a number of major flaws. We describe how this project fails to address the root causes of flooding in Jakarta as well as the primary drivers of vulnerability to flooding. We further show how the Great Garuda project is a channel through which politically connected economic elites of the Suharto regime, now marginalized by democratization and decentralization reforms, can reconstitute ‘growth coalitions’ to benefit from state resources and privileged access to development contracts and concessions. Lastly, we apply and expand on the concept of maladaptation to demonstrate how the project could leave the city and its residents more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than they currently are.