Events

Sustainability

Winning coalitions for green growth and energy security in Indonesia
Europe/Amsterdam 08 2016 08:30
Bron: Thomas Depenbusch / flickr.com
Inleiding

Green growth is increasingly gaining traction as a way to reconcile lasting and broad-based economic growth with climate change mitigation and the goal of sustainable development. As a crucial means to achieve green growth, the energy sector is a central concern. Indonesia is a party to the UNFCCC process and is committed to tackling climate change as viewed from its various policies and programmes. Pioneering the climate commitment among large developing countries, Indonesia decreed a national plan to mitigate the effects of climate change in 2010, and submitted its INDC to the UNFCCC in September 2015 to set out an emission reduction target of 41% by 2030 compared to its business-as-usual scenario.

This expert meeting aims to bring together decision-makers and key stakeholders from Government of Indonesia, private sector and civil society in order to explore from multiple perspectives the potential reach and implementation of green growth plans in Indonesia. On this basis, the meeting will provide a platform to discuss the connections between green growth and energy security concerns, as well as with Indonesia’s integration in the global economy, its national development trajectory, and its policies towards poverty reduction and (regional) stability. A critical part of the meeting will explore how and whether legitimate energy security arguments, such as these related to improving energy access, form an obstacle to green growth, or whether new opportunities are arising for “winning coalitions” for a new style of development as the new renewable energy boom kicks off across Asia and the Pacific.

The meeting explores the relationship between green growth and Indonesia’s emission reduction commitments as submitted under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement of 2015. A key objective will be to gather expert opinions on the viability of Indonesia’s current commitments to climate change mitigation, and what might be reasonably expected of Indonesia in the future.

More broadly, at the meeting different stakeholders will discuss various strategic, future-oriented questions in their field of work.

The meeting will be held under Chatham House rule and attended by stakeholders in the energy sector ranging from senior policy makers to representatives of the private sector and civil society.

Participants will discuss the political economy aspect of this alliance between energy security and green growth. Some of the burning questions include: who gets what? Who gets the benefit? And When? Indonesia has some challenges: decentralization, transactional politics, land regulations and tenure, and institutional arrangements. The workshop discussed about the opportunities: to see alliances between energy security and green growth from different regions, with different actions, inter institutional, and/or within specific sector. Participants discussed that there are a lot of strategies and the solvency will be very different in different sector. Key issues discussed were, among others,  the energy subsidy in Indonesia, energy and electricity access, financial aspects, involvement of community, foreign investors

The programme can be found here. The full list of participants here.