TY - JOUR
T1 - A world away and close to home
T2 - The multi-scalar ‘making of’ Indonesia's energy landscape
AU - Schaffartzik, Anke
AU - Brad, Alina
AU - Pichler, Melanie
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2017/10
Y1 - 2017/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - (re)territorialization
KW - Distal drivers
KW - Energy transition
KW - Palm oil
KW - Social metabolism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85021703383&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.06.045
DO - 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.06.045
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85021703383
SN - 0301-4215
VL - 109
SP - 817
EP - 824
JO - Energy Policy
JF - Energy Policy
ER -