As a follow up to the first ACCCRN social gathering in Melaka in March, we held the first in-country social gathering in Indonesia.
Being held right after we celebrated the Eid-ul Fitr, this event was the first offline networking meeting of our Indonesian members and we also took the opportunity to carry out the Halalbihalal1 ritual. Having worked closely with the Indonesia Climate Alliance (ICA), we also took this opportunity to introduce the ICA as a national network platform for low-carbon and climate-resilience Indonesia.
In keeping with the Halalbihalal spirit, we provided the social gathering as a platform for our members to get to know each other, understand their diverse interests and strengthen their connections as an ACCCRN community with the expectation that they can harness the opportunities to further engage in peer-to-peer learning, meet their needs, and supply them with what they need for collaboration and action. Members from various organizations and backgrounds gathered and shared their experience in building urban climate change resilience.
We also took the opportunity to understand better our members’ expectations from the network and how we can support them better. We also looked at how to further enhance ACCCRN communication outlets, such us newsletters, to disseminate the knowledge from the ACCCRN members’ side, beyond our regular partners. This was one of the expectations raise by Wilmar Salim from Bandung Institute of Technology.
Wilmar was also keen to further explore the potential in having a specific working group which can facilitate the common interests among a small group of committed members, which in his case is urban planning and resilience.
Another issue highlighted by our members was how ACCCRN and ICA, as a national-platform hub, can support the translation of the ideas of climate resilience from the scientific terms and/or political jargon into something with practical meaning. This is one of the challenges that we as a network are currently facing. We understand that it is impossible to have an inclusive approach to nature if the public still perceive climate change resilience as a distant issue. On the network-membership side, one of the direct implications is it will cause them to misunderstand ACCCRN as an ‘exclusive’ network.
We gained such valuable inputs to improve our service to our members, during the interesting discussions. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet our members in person and look forward to the active collaboration of the ACCCRN community, locally, nationally and regionally, in the near future.
---------
[1] A special ritual where Muslim Indonesians visit their elders, in the family, the neighbourhood, or their work, and show respect to them. This could be done during or several days after Idul Fitri. They will also seek reconciliation (if needed), and preserve or restore harmonious relations.
