The Malacca Strait, a system to be tended to

Abstract

The Strait of Malacca is a maritime strait of global importance, yet its role as a living natural system is not recognised within current planning frameworks. Further amplified by growing uncertainty, driven by climate change, this calls into question how conventional practices of spatial planning deal with socio-environmental justice.
The Strait of Malacca is one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors, resulting in conflicting perspectives, with on the one hand a critical global infrastructure, and on the other a complex natural system that sustains life for both human and more-than-human inhabitants of the Strait.
This conflict of values, of global socio-technical and economic perspectives versus ecological and social significance are seen throughout the scales. With the dominant approach imposing more and more on the socio-environmental realities that recognise and depend on the Strait as a dynamic intertwined system, shaped by interdependent ecological, cultural and social relations.
Projected increasing shipping traffic heightens the further risks of marine pollution, erosion, and marine ecosystem decay, while land-based sources of pollution driven by urban and infrastructural development constitute a major cause of environmental deterioration (Rusli, 2011). This intensification will not only increase spatial affectations but also further drive the dichotomy of perspectives and values on a global stage (Meer, 1999). Resulting in coastal and wetland areas within the Strait to be at increased risk.
This disruption and degradation of the natural systems expose the limitations of current short-term adaptive planning practices, remaining reactive and unable to address the complexity of conditions, further driving degradation and inequality.
Rather than proposing adaptive planning practices, this thesis proposes to transform the way of managing these issues, going towards a new balance which is robust, to respond to future conditions and recognise the complexity of natural systems and human dependency within the Strait of Malacca. Drawing on the concepts of critical proximity, critical zones, river basin governance and Rights of Nature, this research investigates how local reality can become operational within governance structures, that is able to respond through time and scales. This is enabled through the implementation of a new governance scale of the river basin, relating better to ecological processes shaped by water, enabling situated practices of care to inform the management of the place.
Driving recognition of the networks that have and currently shape it, to go towards a long-term transformative future which is socially equitable and robust. It is not about “fixing” an issue but about finding a new balance that tends to the Strait as a natural system where both users and inhabitants are recognised.