Sustaining Life on the Fault Line: Women’s Social Reproduction and Grassroots Disaster Governance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Alfita Puspa Handayani, Sandy Hardian Susanto Herho , Iwan Pramesti Anwar, Faruq Khadami, Karina Aprilia Sujatmiko, Sella Lestari Nurmaulia, Walter Timo de Vries

Mainstream disaster resilience studies overwhelmingly privilege top-down institutional frameworks, leaving the socio-economic and care-oriented contributions of women undertheorized as constitutive forces in how resilience is actually produced at the community level. This study examines how women’s everyday practices and organizational capacities shape disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a multi-hazard environment (MHE) defined by continuous geological stress from the Sunda Megathrust, the Opak Fault, and Mount Merapi. Drawing on a qualitative case study of Daya Annisa, a women-led grassroots organization in Bantul Regency, this study deploys Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) to analyze how women’s informal networks operate under conditions of structural vulnerability and state withdrawal. Data were collected through in-depth interviews (IDIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs) and analyzed using thematic coding synthesized through a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) framework reinterpreted as an analytical lens on the structural conditions governing reproductive labor. The findings demonstrate that resilience is produced through gendered social reproductive labor embedded in daily routines: household preparedness integrated into arisan and pengajian gatherings, rapid collective crisis response organized through trust-based care networks, systematic grassroots data production that maps vulnerable populations, and informal livelihood strategies that absorb economic shocks during reconstruction. Organizationally, internal strengths such as high social cohesion and adaptive outreach to marginalized coastal communities are structurally constrained by chronic underfunding, leader concentration, and documentation burdens imposed by donor logics. By foregrounding SRT, this study argues that resilience is not a passive capacity to absorb shocks but the active, gendered, and largely uncompensated labor through which communities are materially sustained when formal state systems and capitalist markets collapse under geological duress. These findings call for disaster policies that recognize grassroots women’s organizations as autonomous governance actors and that compensate, rather than merely celebrate, the reproductive labor on which community survival depends.