Asset cumulation strategies for activating community livelihood resilience in the eruption disaster of Merapi Volcano

The 2010 eruption disaster of Merapi Volcano highlighted a persistent socio-spatial dilemma in volcanic risk governance: agrarian slope communities consistently reject permanent relocation duet to deeply ingrained place attachment and land-based asset depedencies. Focusing on Balerante Village-located 4–5 km from the crater within Disaster-Prone Area III, which suffered severe devastation from dominant pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) yet achieved zero fatalities-this study examines how survivor communities preserve, accumulate, and mobilize assets to activate livelihood resilience. Utilizing a qualitative approach involving in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations, the finding reveal that community persistence is anchored in a dual-rationality worldview (Merapi duwe gawe). Households systematically accumulate portable tangible capitals (bank savings, gold, vehicles, secondary residences) and intangible capitals (social networks, gaduh sapi livestock-sharing, cultural habitus, and digital monitoring platforms) to withstand environmental precarity. Conceptually, this research advances the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) by recasting capital assets from static baseline inventories or passive coping mechanism into dynamic, three-phase tactics across the pre-, peri-, and post-disaster continuum. Ultimately, it demonstrates that strategic asset cumulation is essential for buffering socio-natural disaster shocks and accelerating long-term community recovery.