Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone countries globally, being frequently exposed to various geophysical and climate-related hazards (Lin 2015). Increasing sea-surface temperatures contribute to growing risks of hydrometeorological hazards such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods and landslides. In 2022, flooding was the most frequent type of natural disaster in Indonesia, with floods also having increased in intensity over the preceding decade (Annur 2022). While geophysical disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes have caused more deaths than floods in Indonesia, flooding occurs more often, affects more people, and causes more damage (Djalante et. al. 2017). Flooding is a particular problem in urban areas, both for those along coasts and those located inland in or near water catchments. Rising sea levels are a particular problem for the first group: the newspaper Kompas reported that almost 200 cities in Indonesia's coastal areas will be more frequently exposed to destructive tidal flooding in coming years (Rosalina et al. 2021). Meanwhile, inland urban centres are endangered by a trend of increasingly frequent and intense floods and landslides that have occurred in the 893 inland watershed areas in Indonesia over the past ten years (Wisanggeni et al. 2023).

City governments in Indonesia deal with disasters and disaster risks—particularly flooding—differently. As I show in this chapter, some cities succeed relatively well at managing or even averting floods while others fail. How is it possible that cities operating within the same national context, and often dealing with similar risk factors (such as topography and rainfall patterns), perform very differently in terms of outcomes of flood management? This question becomes even more puzzling when we observe that cities that do not invest heavily in massive technical interventions sometimes do equally well or even better than cities that depend on such interventions.

In this chapter, I draw on my research in three urban regions of Indonesia to propose that the best explanation for how and why cities cope so differently at dealing with floods lies in the local politics of flood risk management. Floods are physical occurrences, but their form, magnitude and location, and the number of people affected by them, are all shaped by political processes (Pelling 1999). Previous studies in Indonesia and beyond have contributed to identifying how flooding intertwines with politics (Coates and Nygren 2020; Padawangi and Douglass 2015).