Erwin Nugraha

Biography

Erwin Nugraha is a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University, UK and a research fellow at Resilience Development Initiative (RDI), Indonesia. His research focuses on the politics and governance of climate change adaptation, urban environmental justice, and planetary decolonisation with a specific interest in the Asia Pacific. He is a member of the Overlooked Cities Collective and Earth System Governance Asia Pacific Working Group. His research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals, including Cities, Environmental Science and Policy, Environment and Urbanization, and Disaster Prevention and Management. He is the co-editor of Overlooked Cities: Power, Politics and Knowledge beyond the Urban South. He was also one of the inaugural recipients of the Allianz Climate Risk Research Award in 2017.

Reflections on being supported by CMMF

I feel very proud to have been selected as one of the Christopher Moyes Memorial Foundation’s scholars. I have benefited a lot from the massive support facilitated by the Foundation during my PhD studies in Durham University. The Foundation has provided the best support where I develop my research interest, strengthen my research skills, build new network and collaborate with other scholars, and invest my time in building my research career. I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to become a CMMF PhD Scholar and benefit from the Foundation supportive and engaging environment.

Research: Risk governance and governmentality in experimental urban adaptation from Indonesian cities.

Erwin started his PhD at the Department of Geography in January 2015. His PhD research focuses on how efforts to build urban climate change experimentation towards resilience in two cities in Indonesia function as a distinctive form of governmentality. Using governmentality as an analytical toolbox, his research evaluated how particular mentalities are invested in the process of governing urban climate experimentation through a set of rationalities, apparatus, and subjectivities. It examined the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), for which two cities in Indonesia have joined since 2009, as an intermediary organisation for initiating, mediating and experimenting with adaptation planning and urban resilience.

In his PhD study, Erwin analysed how urban climate change resilience in ACCCRN exemplified different forms of knowledge about the climate, assembled into a web of urban practitioners, agenda, policies, and forms of calculation and circulated around urban subjectivities. His PhD study exemplified cities not only as socio-technical actors but also sites for problem-solving, mediation and policy arena. In his PhD study, he applied qualitative research methods by collecting and analysing qualitative data including semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, as well as project and policy documents. Ewrin was selected as one of the finalists of Allianz Climate Risk Research Award for which Erwin is the only social scientist among natural scientists in December 2017 in Germany. This award recognised his PhD research and its contribution to the advancement of societal and urban research to prepare for climate change risks with a specific focus on cities in the global south.

Selected Publications and presentations

 
Working paper and conference proceedings
 
Conference session organisation
  • 2018 “Urban south’s medium-sized cities: emerging research session (1) & (2)”, RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, sponsored by Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG), co-convenors with Dr Hanna Ruszczyk (Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, University of Durham). Cardiff, UK, August 31, 2018.
 
Conference presentations