Pathways to Disaster Risk Reduction Education integration in schools: Insights from SPAB evaluation in Indonesia

The World Conference on Disaster Reduction 2005 endorsed the first and significant global promotion for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) integration in schools. Within 15 years of progress of the global and national movements for DRR education in Indonesia, this research asks three key research questions: First, how do schools adopt and sustain DRR education? Second, how do local and national actors upscale the integration of DRR education in schools? Third, what are the challenges and opportunities of DRR education in Indonesia? Using an explorative and qualitative approach, this research evaluation combined primary and secondary data. Ten transdisciplinary workshops were carried out involving 211 participants in four provinces involving key stakeholders such as educators, policy-makers, government and NGO workers at both national and local levels during June–August 2020. This paper offers new insights by identifying new pathways of DRR integration in schools where school-based DRR can be inextricably linked to family-based DRR and community-based DRR programming. However, DRR integration in schools and schools' adoption of DRR education remains paternalistic in which schools are heavily dependent on the local government initiatives. In contrast, local governments are hesitant to invest in DRR education. The paper concludes that such institutional gaps delay upscale DRR education and DRR integration in schools. This research is significant because it serves as an early warning of the potential failures to meet the targets of the Sendai Framework for the rest of disaster-prone and low-to-middle-income countries.