A Transformative Process for Urban Climate Resilience: The Case of Water as Leverage Resilient Cities Asia in Semarang, Indonesia

The Water as Leverage Resilient Cities Asia program introduced a transformative process to explore, design and implement inclusive, integrated and holistic climate solutions for three cities in Asia. Focusing on the city of Semarang, Indonesia, this chapter aims to assess whether, and if so, how the program has been able to build resilience capacities and to draw lessons that can be applied in other cities. Our analysis shows that the program in Semarang developed an enabling environment and has increased transformative capacity by building strong stakeholder coalitions between multidisciplinary design teams, governmental agencies, knowledge partners and NGOs. The collaboration between these actors led to the development of an innovative programmatic approach, which comprises six interrelated, inclusive and integrated climate solutions. When implemented, these solutions will also increase the city’s threshold, coping and adaptive capacity. The implementation of such solutions, however, proves to be a complex financial and institutional challenge.