Why is the response to H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) so challenged in Indonesia? Why did the virus spread so fast, and why has the disease persisted? Are there features of the country and its culture that encourage or inhibit the disease? Is the internationally led response appropriately sensitive to local contexts? This paper suggests that distinctive social, cultural, economic and political factors work against a technocratic response such as has been employed in Indonesia. The paper explores the interactions between global bio-medicine, a mesh of power relations linking health, industry, institutionalism and governance, and Indonesia’s diverse and complex political and social contexts. How is an infectious zoonotic disease controlled in a dynamic environment where modernist models of authority and rationality are unproven?
Since H5N1 was first detected in central Java in mid-2003, it has spread to 31 of Indonesia’s 33 provinces,
The principle aim of this research was to investigate the roles of gender and religion in child-centred disaster risk reduction (DRR). Moreover, and through participatory research, informal conversations and direct advocacy, the project team hoped to build knowledge and awareness of child-centred DRR.
The research was also designed tov alidate findings from previous research by the wider project team and to provide a body of empirical evidence in support of child-centred DRR and the Children in a Changing Climate programme.
This thesis examines the Influenza A/H5N1 virus in action through an ethnographic study focused on the entwined concepts of risk and modernity. The objective is to explain why the response to the virus has been challenged in Indonesia.
Concerned with policy formulation, and everyday practice, the thesis argues that assemblages of historical, political, institutional and knowledge‐power processes create multiple hybrid constructions of risk and modernity, which challenge technical responses based on epistemological positions and institutional arrangements that do not allow for such hybridity.