A world away and close to home: The multi-scalar ‘making of’ Indonesia's energy landscape

Anke Schaffartzik, Alina Brad and Melanie Pichler

Energy Policy, 2017, vol. 109, issue C, 817-824

Abstract: Indonesia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, a feedstock for agrofuels and an important source of direct, nutritional energy for human consumption. The country is also an important global supplier of coal, petroleum and natural gas while per capita fossil energy consumption is relatively low. For biomass- and fossil fuel-based energy, Indonesia has been transforming its energy landscape in order to provide for foreign demand. The landscape - both in literal and in the figurative sense - simultaneously forms and is formed by the material resource flows required for society's biophysical reproduction, i.e. the social metabolism; in the context of the ongoing energy transition, both are subject to change. In our analysis of Indonesia's palm oil production, we find that the drivers shaping the country's resource use as well as its energy landscape are located at a spatial, temporal, and functional distance from where they take effect. The energy landscape and resource use patterns are formed across levels of scale, from the subnational to the global. Energy policy confined to the framework of the sovereign nation-state cannot effectively address the complex drivers of increasingly detrimental environmental change associated with energy transitions nor can it trigger a sustainability transition.

Keywords: Energy transition; Palm oil; Social metabolism; Distal drivers; (re)territorialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517303993
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:109:y:2017:i:c:p:817-824

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.06.045

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().