Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Dutch hydraulic expertise, now framed as essential heritage for climate solutions, shaped Jakarta's current water vulnerabilities. Conceiving such vulnerabilities as colonial inheritance, this paper challenges universal knowledge claims and narrow heritage narratives.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how Dutch hydraulic expertise - which has shaped landscapes and societies across its former empire and beyond - continues to structure climate futures in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on archival research in the Netherlands and Jakarta, I trace how the contemporary significance of Dutch hydraulic expertise is actively produced through heritage-making and memory work. In the Netherlands, this process frames the nation's history of controlling “unruly” water as exceptional, positioning Dutch expertise as indispensable for climate solutions in delta regions worldwide. In Jakarta, however, I show that the uneven exposure to flooding, subsidence, and ecological degradation now understood as climate risks cannot be separated from the hydraulic infrastructure that fundamentally restructured the city’s waterscape during Dutch colonial rule. Reading these sites together, I argue that repair and ruination are not separate processes but a coupled trajectory: the same expertise now positioned as essential to Jakarta's climate future is also implicated in the city's ongoing urban ruination. By attending to the ruination contemporary climate and heritage discourse occlude and reproduce, this paper unsettles the primacy of expert, universal(ising) knowledge, rendering other means of climate repair thinkable, beyond its gaze and recursive logics. It also challenges prevailing conceptions of heritage as a carefully curated historical essence of community or nation, foregrounding instead the complex inheritances typically excluded from such narrow views.