The Local Democracy Academy 2022 (Visby, Sweden) awarded the best conference paper to PhD researcher Yogi Permana for his paper ‘Drainage politics: The flood management in Indonesian cities’. The conference, hosted by the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy and Uppsala University from 5 – 11 June, brought together an international group of leading scholars from 35 countries for a week of mutual learning, critical thinking and joint exploration of new ideas to foster a more inclusive local democracy on a global scale.

Yogi’s paper discusses findings from his on-going PhD research on a sub-national comparative analysis of climate politics in Indonesia, part of the KITLV research agenda on the governance of climate change adaptation in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. In his research Yogi compares flood management in two big Indonesian cities and looks at the character of local democracy to explain the different outcomes of flood management as a case of the impact of climate change and the local governance.