Drawing on Agamben’s concept of the state of exception, emergency measures initially framed as temporary frequently become normalized, reshaping governance beyond moments of crisis (Agamben, 2005).
Modern states increasingly govern through emergency powers that suspend normal legal order. Emergency governance in Indonesia often becomes a stage for the performance of masculinity through decisiveness, control, and heroism. The consequences of the logic of domination over nature are responded to by the state’s logic of power and control. This reinforces hierarchical structures while marginalizing relational, care-based, and community-centered forms of initiative that women commonly practice.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-flood response in Sumatra and Aceh at the end of 2025, Indonesian emergency governance sidelined gender-responsive concerns. It reproduced masculinized models of crisis management and further entrenched structural inequalities. The pattern has moved beyond temporary crises and has become embedded in routine governmental approaches to disaster management in Indonesia.
Six years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Indonesia has entered another obstacle of crisis management in which reliance on fragmented, centralized, and gender-insensitive state governance has become normalized. Emergency governance in disaster contexts is not merely the outcome of reactive interactions between human practices and nature.
They also reflect the state’s preparedness, as well as its long-standing failures to produce inclusive disaster governance and to amplify the voices of communities and women across Indonesia who have consistently warned about environmental destruction driven by extractive capitalism. A similar pattern occurred during the COVID-19 outbreak, when the government initially downplayed and denied the severity of the virus and its impact.
Read More: No More Silence, Let’s Talk About Unwanted Pregnancy
Disaster governance in Indonesia has been structured around command-based models that prioritize speed, coordination, and territorial control. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Indonesia adopted centralized decision-making, large-scale mobility restrictions, and security-led enforcement, concentrating executive power over fiscal policy, social assistance, and public movement.
Similar patterns emerged in the emergency response to the Sumatra-Aceh floods of 2025, marked by hierarchical coordination, military involvement, and technocratic control. Even the organizations and national task force, such as Gugus Tugas COVID-19, that were responsible for handling COVID-19 in Indonesia from the outset of the pandemic, were dominated by active and retired TNI officers.
A composition that observers argue contributed to a militaristic approach and limited transparency in data and public information during the early phase of the crisis response. These approaches reflect Indonesian institutional cultures that are historically rooted in the New Order era.
Indonesia government always treated disasters like a war front, deploying a militaristic approach rather than prioritizing community-based and gender-sensitive responses. Meanwhile, gendered impacts, including increased domestic burdens, rising domestic violence, women’s safety in shelters, access to reproductive health services, and economic protection for informal women workers, were treated as secondary concerns, revealing a persistent disconnect between crisis governance and the principles of care, resilience, and sustainability embodied in women’s everyday practices.
Media representations reinforced this pattern. Images of male politicians in disaster zones, the military, and state apparatuses rescuing women and children circulated widely, constructing a paternal narrative of state protection. Women were symbolically central as vulnerable subjects. However, they are politically marginal in decision-making processes. The spectacle of rescue operations highlighted heroism and strength, but obscured community-level resilience and informal survival networks.
Read more: 2025 Year-End Edition: Women’s Resistance in the Season of Arrests and the Year of #DemocracyApocalypse
Emergency governance thus became not only an administrative mechanism but also a narrative performance of sovereign power. This dynamic reflects what can be described as performative male leadership, in which authority is enacted through displays of command, protection, and control. During these events, public outrage in Indonesia intensified across social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp groups. In both crises, citizens openly questioned the coordination between central and regional authorities.
Across both the pandemic and flood crises of 2025, emergency governance in Indonesia demonstrated recurring characteristics. Sidelining of established frameworks, including those related to gender mainstreaming and inclusive planning. Repeated cycles of crisis risk entrench this model as a standard mode of governance rather than an exceptional measure. In this context, the state of exception shifts from a temporary departure to a normalized and enduring feature of political governance.
The Failure of Environmental and Gender Policies in Emergency Governance
Emergency governance in Indonesia contained a distinct gendered dimension. Women play indispensable roles during crises. In flood-affected areas of Sumatra and Aceh, women organized communal kitchens, managed shelter logistics, cared for children and elderly family members, and maintained networks of mutual aid.
Similar patterns happened during the pandemic; women in Indonesia carried a disproportionate share of the burden, particularly through the sharp increase in unpaid domestic and care work. As schools and care services closed, women absorbed much of the responsibility for childcare, education, and household management, intensifying time pressure and emotional strain (Power, 2020).
Without targeted interventions, these unequal impacts are likely to persist, underscoring the central role of the care economy in sustaining both families and broader economic systems.
In temporary shelters following a disaster, issues such as privacy, protection from gender based violence, access to reproductive health services, and childcare facilities were not always systematically integrated into planning. Field observations byInternational Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) in post-disaster recovery in Aceh-Sumatra flood disaster 2025 indicated persistent gender-based disparities in disaster aid distribution.
Access to assistance and recovery programs is frequently contingent upon formal asset ownership and administrative recognition as household heads, conditions that systematically marginalize women. In evacuation sites and temporary shelters, inadequate provisions for privacy, security, and gender-sensitive facilities have further increased women’s exposure to the risk of gender-based violence.
Read More: Arrests at the End of the Day: Arrested While Hanging Out, Allegations of Sexual Harassment
ICAIOS also highlighted that in the absence of the systematic integration of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) framework and the use of disaggregated data by gender, age, and disability, disaster governance and recovery policies are likely to perpetuate patterns of exclusion and reinforce existing structural inequalities.
The reality on the ground demonstrates how women bear multiple burdens amidst the crisis. Many survivors in the Aceh-Sumatra flood of 2025, particularly women, exhibited clear signs of trauma: difficulty sleeping, recurring nightmares, and heightened fear. Some began withdrawing from social interactions, losing interest in daily activities, and even displaying symptoms of depression. In shelter, women often serve as pillars of support that cannot be allowed to crumble. They are the logistics managers, protectors of children, and guardians of family security, all while neglecting their own needs.
Figure 1: Total Reported Cases of Violence Against Women in Indonesia, 2013–2022
Source:Komnas Perempuan (2023)
According to Komnas Perempuan (National Commission on Violence Against Women), aggregated data for 2021 recorded 338,496 cases of gender-based violence against women, representing an increase of nearly 50% from 226,062 cases in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reports submitted to service providers also rose significantly during this period. As shown in Figure 1, the escalation of gender-based violence following crises in Indonesia has not been adequately reduced. Moreover, in 2025, this number did not decline but instead increased by 14.17% compared to the previous year, indicating the deepening of structural vulnerabilities faced by women.
Read more: Stop Tech Misogyny: The Long Chain of Gender-Based Cyber Attacks and Disinformation
Indonesia formally recognizes gender mainstreaming within its policy framework, and institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection (KEMENPPPA) have issued guidelines for gender responsive disaster management. However, under emergency conditions, these mechanisms are often treated as secondary.
The urgency prioritizes rapid disbursement of funds, infrastructure repair, and visible restoration of order. Care-oriented, relational, and equality-based obscured from government disaster governance. This reflects a masculinist logic of governance that equates effectiveness with control, command, and speed. The 2024 Annual Report of Komnas Perempuan stated the interconnection between ecological degradation, natural resource conflicts, and the increasing vulnerability of women.
Komnas Perempuan also emphasized that the recent disasters in Aceh, West Sumatra, and North Sumatra cannot be separated from deforestation, the expansion of large-scale mining and plantation industries, and weak protection of Indigenous peoples’ customary territories (Komnas Perempuan, 2024). These processes are embedded within a male-dominated logic of extraction that prioritizes control, exploitation, and economic accumulation over ecological sustainability and care.
At the same time, state policies and licensing regimes continue to permit the operation and expansion of extractive industries that have generated environmental degradation for decades. Large-scale mining, plantation expansion, and resource extraction reshape landscapes, weaken ecological buffers, and intensify flood risks. These industrial operations are authorized through regulatory decisions that rarely integrate gender impact assessments. As a result, the structural drivers of disaster vulnerability persist, even as women are framed as priority beneficiaries of relief.
Read More: Indonesian Academics, Do We Stop Taking Accountability on Research Papers?
Indonesia’s environmental policies also fail to incorporate gender perspectives, further deepening this contradiction. Women in rural and disaster-prone areas often bear disproportionate responsibility for water collection, food security, caregiving, and community survival. When environmental degradation reduces access to land, clean water, and sustainable livelihoods, the burden falls heavily on them. Environmental governance and spatial planning processes remain largely technocratic and gender blind. Without gender responsive environmental regulation, women are positioned simultaneously as symbolic subjects of protection and as those who absorb the long term social and ecological costs of development policies.
In this sense, the state’s crisis response may internalize women as objects of care within emergency management, while its extractive and environmental policies reproduce conditions that heighten their vulnerability. The absence of gender sensitive environmental governance thus becomes a structural problem, linking emergency politics with decades of unequal development and ecological exploitation.
Grassroots Women Leaders and Adaptation in the Times of Crisis
Across Indonesia, local women’s initiative has demonstrated adaptive capacity in times of crisis. Women’s community organizations and religious women’s groups played central roles in mobilizing mutual aid, distributing food, and disseminating public health information at the neighborhood level.
In the pre-disaster (preparedness) phase, important steps include storing all essential documents in an emergency bag. Disaster recovery in Indonesia shows that women frequently lead in socialization regarding pre- and post-disaster, identify vulnerable groups such as elderly residents and pregnant women, and organize community kitchens and temporary shelter management.
Broader analyses of post disaster reconstruction also highlight that local leaders, including women, are crucial in restoring livelihoods and rebuilding small-scale entrepreneurship after environmental shocks. The UNDRR (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) report further notes that the active participation of women in disaster risk management can reduce disaster-related losses by approximately 20–30 percent.
The experience gained during the COVID-19 pandemic strengthened women’s capacity for decentralized data collection, aid tracking, and psychosocial support, demonstrating continuity between public health emergency management and flood disaster governance. When women possess economic resources and have a voice in decision-making processes, community resilience increases substantially. Women’s involvement can foster disaster-resilient micro-enterprise networks, support the management of community emergency funds, and enable them to serve as trainers or facilitators for other communities.
Read more: 2025 Year-End Edition: Women’s Resistance in the Season of Arrests and the Year of #DemocracyApocalypse
Women act as vital connectors between disaster management and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). My ongoing research explores how Indigenous women in North Sumatra, since the 1980s, have generated enduring forms of cultural resilience through practices of ecological care and grassroots activism. By sustaining collective memory through counter-archives, these women and younger generations have positioned themselves at the forefront of resistance against environmental destruction driven by extractive industries in the Toba region, including PT Toba Pulp Lestari, one of the companies whose operating license was revoked by the Indonesian government earlier this year due to its contribution to ecological degradation.
In Kalimantan, Indigenous Dayak women mobilize traditional ecological knowledge to protect forests as sources of life and to adapt amid the pressures of extractive expansion (Niko et al., 2024). There is also evidence that Indigenous Dayak women farmers in Kalumpang Village, Central Kalimantan, have mobilized traditional knowledge, particularly hurung hapakat (meaning “working together”), through rattan handicraft production as a survival strategy to sustain their livelihoods following land dispossession and deforestation caused by palm oil plantations. These initiatives must be recognized, transmitted, and systematically integrated by the Indonesian government into the Indigenous Peoples Bill (RUU Masyarakat Adat) as a gender-responsive climate resilience mechanism.
Cultural practices often intensify women’s vulnerability, particularly in disaster-affected contexts, as observed in Aceh. In the days leading up to Eid al-Fitr, Acehnese communities observe a long-standing tradition known as meugang, a communal practice of sharing meals with family members and relatives. Women play a central role in ensuring that meugang is properly carried out, encompassing the procurement of food ingredients, cooking, and the organization of communal meals. However, under current conditions, sustaining this tradition has become increasingly difficult.
Read more: Stop Tech Misogyny: The Long Chain of Gender-Based Cyber Attacks and Disinformation
In addition to economic constraints, the post-disaster context has further disrupted its implementation, deepening collective longing for its continuation. More broadly, across Indonesia, cultural practices that are socially expected to be continuously maintained often impose substantial physical, emotional, and economic burdens on women, particularly during periods of disaster and emergency.
Taken together, these experiences demonstrate that women’s grassroots leadership, cultural knowledge, and everyday labor constitute a critical foundation for community resilience in times of crisis. These contributions remain structurally undervalued and insufficiently integrated into formal disaster governance and climate adaptation policies. Recognizing, protecting, and institutionalizing women’s leadership is therefore not merely a matter of equity, but a strategic necessity for building just, sustainable, and disaster-resilient societies in Indonesia.
Policy Context and Strategic Recommendations
Addressing these structural imbalances requires a set of interconnected reforms that place gender justice at the center of crisis governance. Gender-responsive principles need to be firmly embedded within emergency governance, rather than treated as sideline objectives. Declarations of emergency should automatically activate mandatory gender impact assessments and ensure the meaningful inclusion of women’s representatives in high-level decision-making bodies.
At the same time, legal frameworks, including the Indigenous Peoples Bill (RUU Masyarakat Adat), must be grounded in evidence and explicitly recognize the initiatives, knowledge systems, and intergenerational legacies of Indigenous women in advancing climate resilience and environmental protection in Indonesia.
Strengthening data systems is equally critical. Crisis response must be informed by reliable, gender-disaggregated data that capture the realities of informal labor, unpaid care work, gender-based violence, and female-headed households. Without such data, social assistance and emergency support will continue to privilege those already visible within formal economic structures, reinforcing existing inequalities.
Disaster preparedness also needs to move beyond militarized and infrastructure-centered approaches toward community-based resilience strategies that recognize women as leaders rather than passive recipients of aid. Investments in training, leadership development, and sustained funding for women’s organizations can significantly enhance local capacities long before crises unfold.
Read more: 2025 Year-End Edition: Women’s Resistance in the Season of Arrests and the Year of #DemocracyApocalypse
Public communication plays a powerful role in shaping social perceptions and policy priorities. Media narratives should therefore shift away from reproducing paternalistic images of male heroism and female vulnerability, and instead highlight women’s leadership, expertise, and agency in recovery and reconstruction processes.
Ultimately, long-term reforms in environmental governance are indispensable for reducing disaster risk itself. Tackling deforestation, regulating extractive industries, and ensuring meaningful community participation in land-use decisions are inseparable from the pursuit of gender equality. Environmental vulnerability and gender injustice intersect most sharply in rural and marginalized regions, making it imperative for sustainable and inclusive governance to confront these dynamics directly.
In conclusion, emergency governance in Indonesia cannot be understood as purely technical or neutral. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2025 floods in Sumatra-Aceh reveal how the state of exception centralizes authority and narrows participatory space.
Within this configuration, gender perspectives are frequently marginalized despite women’s indispensable contributions to community survival. Transforming this pattern requires institutionalizing gender responsive mechanisms within emergency law, strengthening women’s political representation, improving data systems, and reorienting disaster governance toward care, equity, and structural accountability. Only by challenging the masculinist logic embedded in crisis management can Indonesia move toward a more inclusive and democratic model of resilience.
Reference
Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception (K. Attell, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 2003).
Jannah, Rikhul. (2026, February 25). ICAIOS: Pemulihan pascabencana Aceh-Sumatra harus melindungi perempuan dan kelompok rentan. NU Online.https://www.nu.or.id/nasional/icaios-pemulihan-pascabencana-aceh-sumatra-harus-lindungi-perempuan-dan-kelompok-rentan-Tj7AE
Komnas Perempuan. (2025, November 12). Komnas Perempuan: Negara jangan abai hak kesehatan dan kesentosaan perempuan. Komnas Perempuan. https://komnasperempuan.go.id/siaran-pers-detail/siaran-pers-komnas-perempuan-memperingati-hari-kesehatan-nasional
Niko, N., Widianingsih, I., Sulaeman, M., & Fedryansyah, M. (2024). Indigenous women’s connection to the forest: Colonialism, lack of land ownership, and livelihood deprivations of Dayak Benawan in Indonesia.Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 8(1), 1-13.https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/14233
Power, K. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy, 16(1), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2020.1776561
Setyonaluri, Diahhadi, & Rachmat Reksa Samudra. (2020, September 23). Di Indonesia, analisis ungkap perempuan miskin yang paling menderita selama pandemi COVID-19. The Conversation Indonesia. https://theconversation.com/di-indonesia-analisis-ungkap-perempuan-miskin-yang-paling-menderita-selama-pandemi-covid-19-146676
Sinombor, Sonya Hellen. (2025, December 6). Jangan ada lagi perempuan jadi korban, cegah kekerasan berbasis jender di pengungsian. Kompas.id. https://www.kompas.id/artikel/jangan-lagi-ada-kekerasan-berbasis-jender-di-lokasi-bencana-lindungi-perempuan-pengungsi
Souisa, Hellena. (2020, June 26). Diawali dengan pendekatan militeristik, pendekatan apa yang sekarang dipakai pemerintah dalam penanganan COVID-19? ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/indonesian/2020-06-26/pendekatan-militeristik-indonesia-dalam-penanganan-covid-19/12391548
Zailani, Laili. (2026, January 23). Dari sempak ke martabat: Catatan pribadi relawan banjir Aceh Tamiang. Magdalene. https://magdalene.co/story/gender-posko-bencana-martabat/
(Editor: Nurul Nur Azizah)
