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

In multi-hazard environments, women’s social reproductive labor often constitutes a foundation of community survival, yet remains undertheorized in disaster scholarship. This study contributes to an active scholarly conversation by examining Daya Annisa, a women-led grassroots organization in Bantul Regency, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a region under continuous geological stress from the Sunda Megathrust, the Opak Fault, and Mount Merapi. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions analyzed through Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), with a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) framework reinterpreted as an analytical lens on the structural conditions of reproductive labor, the analysis traces four interlinked practices: preparedness embedded in arisan and pengajian gatherings, community-based vulnerability mapping, trust-based crisis response, and informal post-disaster livelihoods. The paper argues that resilience in such settings is best understood not as a passive capacity to absorb shocks, but as the active, gendered, and largely uncompensated labor through which communities are materially sustained when formal systems are stretched. Three policy shifts follow: long-term flexible funding calibrated to continuous reproductive preparedness; institutional integration of community-generated vulnerability data with appropriate privacy and inclusion safeguards; and inclusion of grassroots women’s organizations as autonomous decision-making actors in disaster governance.