Thinking beyond success and failure: Dutch water expertise and friction in postcolonial Jakarta

Abstract

In 2014, a consortium of Dutch firms revealed the master plan for Jakarta’s Great Garuda Sea Wall project, combining urban development and flood risk management. Though a ground-breaking ceremony was held, little progress has since been made, and the yet-to-be materialized project faces an uncertain future. Taking this project as its case study, this article examines the efforts of Dutch consultants to realize the proposed Great Garuda Sea Wall project in Jakarta, and the frictions encountered during this process. This article contributes to a growing scholarship in policy mobilities that interrogates instances of policy failure. I begin from the premise that there are valuable insights to be gleaned by examining projects and policies that occupy the space in between failure and success. By using the lens of friction, this article aims to think beyond these categories and their limitations. I demonstrate how friction can be simultaneously productive and disruptive to policymaking and mobilizing, therefore complicating binary representations of success and failure. Abandoning these limiting categories holds the possibility of enriching policy mobilities scholarship by opening up space for analyses of the messy and indeterminate processes that are central to policymaking, and which categories of success and failure are unable to capture. This is especially important for understanding policymaking in the context of the “global South” where projects often remain unrealized and such categories are less analytically useful.

Beyond the success/failure of travelling urban models: Exploring the politics of time and performance in Cape Town’s East City

“…Taken together, these developments generate novel insights into the conflicting and incremental nature of urban policymaking and the variety of actors – human and non-human – involved in moving, interpreting, contesting, and enacting mobile urban policies. In this article we stress the necessity to move beyond the perceived dualism between the failure to move and the successful arrival of mutating policies, in line with other recent contributions (Baker and McCann, 2018; Colven, 2020; McCann and Ward, 2015). Specifically, we argue that studying both the historical evolution of travelling urban models as sets of ideas that land in particular places, and their performative enactments through different mediums over time, constitutes a relevant entry point to understanding the continuous and unpredictable process of policy transfer, mutation, failure and rebirth.…”

“…Thus, the latest developments in Cape Town's East City reiterates the importance for policy mobilities research to look beyond official project timeframes and policy moments (as already observed for instance by Colven, 2020). Rather, considering the politics of time more broadly and attending to seemingly disjointed events and actions can help us understand how failed urban modelling interventions can still be enacted and performed in unexpected ways beyond coordinated public place-making efforts.…”

“…Taken together, these still led to the organic transformation of the East City as a gentrifying ‘creative precinct’. Our case is instructive for contemporary policy mobilities scholarship as it traces how seemingly failed urban projects can come to life anyways, thus highlighting the need to move beyond absolute notions of failure and success to better understand the concrete local enactment of globally mobile urban policies (Baker and McCann, 2018; Colven, 2020; McCann and Ward, 2015). In studying the politics of time through performative moments of socio-material enactment, we emphasized the conceptual value of performativity in analysing the local translation of mobile urban policies at different points in time.…”

“…Our contribution attends to the politics of time and performance to understand how different enactments of mobile urban models shape localities incrementally and in unforeseen ways, over time. This perspective advances current urban policy mobilities research by looking beyond the success/failure dichotomy (Colven, 2020), emphasizing the open-ended and conflicting nature of travelling urban models as ideas that can be appropriated and brought to life by different actors and networks at different points in time -sometimes even after their publicly proclaimed failure. In the next sections, we first explain our theoretical and methodological take on exploring the politics of time and performance in urban policy mobilities research.…”

The urban politics of policy failure

“…The argument for a temporal turn is also an argument for a relational one (Massey, 2005). The relational turn in urban geography is not new, yet the renewed interest in this epistemological thread brings new actors into debates and analyses of urban policy failure, not only focusing on policy makers (McCann & Ward, 2011;Ward, 2018), but also activists (Temenos, 2017;Lauermann & Vogelpohl, 2019), everyday actors (Baker et al, 2020;Jacobs & Lees, 2013), and planners and consultants (Colven, 2020;Larner & Laurie, 2010;Rapoport, 2015;Vogelpohl, 2018). Expanding the scope of study to encompass new relationships can broaden and enrich the spatial analysis of urban geographies of policy, taking into account different power structures that make up local contexts and expanding the scope of possibility for urban politics.…”