Meeting with Subandono D., KKP (DKP)

Wednesday, July 14th 2010, KKP (formerly DKP): National Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries

Subandono D.

Subandono is a contact in the national government who has been a great help in the past with understanding how the Padang government operates and what their relationship is to the national government. Having a high position within KKP, Subandono knows about many projects that are going on around the country to mitigate the tsunami risk in ports and coastal towns because that is their responsibility, and Subandono takes it personally. They recently starting planting mangroves, 240,000 USD worth in ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬__________ .

We learned that the national government has money for mitigation in Padang, and Subandono has been wanting and trying to work there for awhile, but the local government (mayor, BPBD, etc.) are too difficult to work with. So although the money is available and there is an effort to get it to the people of Padang, there is entity that is standing in the way, the city officials. Unfortunately, any significant mitigation cannot be done without the government involvement and support, and they should be supportive. Everything takes three times as long as it should, too (see Lucy’s flowchart).

Additionally, Subandono was able to provide us, Andi mostly since he needs to translate it, with the laws we should know in order to do a large project in Padang, and register it with the national government to make sure that all the money put into the project is put to appropriate use. It is a very complicated law and in Indonesian, which leads us to believe that many NGOs in the region do not know very much about it, or try to work around it by doing smaller projects.

Lastly, we were able to get a brief idea of KKP’s 20 year plan for disaster mitigation in Indonesia. It seems like a massive undertaking and a plan that took a long time to create. Apparently it can be changed at updated at will, though. With all of Indonesia’s disasters (earthquakes, floods, landslides, tsunamis, typhoons, fire, political unrest, and more) each part of the government is responsible for some part of this mitigation plan. With such a large undertaking, the national government certainly cannot do all of the pre-disaster work; so they delegate to the local governments, and as long as these officials are responsive, the progress can be significant as seen in other regions of the country.

Hopefully we and the city of Padang will soon be able to take advantage of the work that KKP is able to do.