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

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.