A participatory approach to support communities in Eastern Indonesia to build their resilience to climate change is also improving opportunities for people with disabilities to contribute to research.
The Building a Model of Future-proofing for Climate Resilience by Engaging Communities (MoFCREC) project, supported by KONEKSI, is a collaboration between 16 researchers and 14 partner organisations.
Research collaborators in MoFCREC have come together from universities, government, industry, and civil society, including organisations of people with disability, in Makassar, Lombok, and Kupang.
The project employs a participatory action research (PAR) approach. PAR is built on the assumption that affected communities themselves are the experts when it comes to developing climate resilience solutions. The method employs an array of approaches, including interviews, focus groups, situational analysis, workshops, and deep, ongoing, collaborative engagement.
A human rights research lens is guiding the project, upholding the dignity of individuals and communities and rooted in the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality acknowledges how different aspects of a person’s identity – such as age, gender, ethnicity, disability, and other pertinent factors – combine and compound to produce varying degrees of disadvantage and privilege.
The project’s commitment to inclusion has created new learning opportunities for research partners, and the chance for researchers with disabilities to contribute to generating new knowledge.
“As a researcher, I am relatively new to working with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), specifically Organisations of Persons with Disabilities,” said Dr. Welmince Djulete from Monash University Indonesia.
“Therefore, I’m trying my best to slow down my work pace,” she added.
For civil society organisations, being involved as a research partner has also provided learning opportunities and access to new resources.
Berti Malingara, Vice Director of disability rights organisation GARAMIN (Gerakan Advokasi Transformasi Disabilitas untuk Inklusi), said that by working with other research partners in the project, she learned ways to carry out tasks faster. The partnership had also brought about a better understanding of disability, Berti added.
“As a researcher with low vision, research materials weren’t always easily accessible,” said Nur Syarif Ramadhan, a researcher from disability NGO PerDIK (Pergerakan Difabel Indonesia untuk Kesetaraan).
“However, Monash University addressed my accessibility needs by providing various tools, which allowed me to fully participate in the research.”
MoFCREC is providing a range of opportunities for early career scholars, researchers with disability and other future thought leaders in the fields of climate change and community resilience.
Participatory action research empowers local communities to contribute to solution-building and underscores the critical role of human rights and intersectionality in forming inclusive policy, to ensure that no one is left behind. The project is also supporting the development of reports and policy briefs to help policymakers and change makers understand gender equality, disability inclusion, social inclusion, resilience, and climate change, and to ensure the specific needs of vulnerable communities are met.
Ultimately, researchers hope the model generated through MoFCREC can be scaled up, and its findings used to help Indonesia, and the Southeast Asian region more broadly, to strengthen inclusive, community-based resilience to climate change.