Governing urban floods in an emerging capital region: a social-ecological-technological systems policy analysis of Samarinda City, Indonesia

Abstract

Urban flood governance in Samarinda is entering a new regional context. The establishment of Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) and the emerging IKN–Samarinda–Balikpapan urban ecosystem are accelerating spatial, infrastructural, and institutional interdependence across East Kalimantan. This transition increases the importance of ensuring that Samarinda's flood policies are not only technically effective but also socially inclusive and ecologically grounded. This study applies the Social–Ecological–Technological Systems (SETS) framework to: (1) classify the composition of existing flood-control policies in Samarinda, and (2) identify SETS components that receive comparatively limited policy attention. A directed content analysis was conducted on 11 policy and planning documents. The analysis identified 314 flood-related strategies, which were coded into 3 SETS domains and 12 categories (S1–S5, E1–E3, and T1–T4). Social strategies accounted for 131 entries (41.7%), technological strategies for 105 (33.4%), and ecological strategies for 78 (24.8%). The Samarinda Spatial Plan 2023–2042 was the only document with a relatively balanced distribution across the three domains. Using the dataset mean of 26.2 strategies per code as an internal representation benchmark, five categories were relatively well represented (S1, S2, E1, T2, and T4), whereas seven were below the corpus mean: participation and collaboration (S3), knowledge transfer and risk communication (S4), economic mechanisms (S5), green infrastructure (E2), ecosystem services and hydrological functions (E3), design codes and standards (T1), and infrastructure operation and maintenance (T3). The findings suggest that Samarinda has a regulatory and engineered-infrastructure foundation for flood management but several governance capabilities needed to be strengthened in an emerging capital region, particularly cross-jurisdictional collaboration, blue–green infrastructure, lifecycle financing, and maintenance. A more balanced SETS approach is therefore required to support resilient development across Samarinda and the wider Nusantara capital region.