As much as a quarter of the Indonesian population (around 65 million people) live in rural or remote villages. Indonesia’s development agenda includes installing an additional 35 GW of new electricity generation capacity by 2025, with at least 23% of national supply being sourced from renewable energy technologies. While Indonesian government energy policies are not firmly established, there is a national consensus that providing electricity to communities throughout the country is an important development objective. Distributed small-scale power generation is necessary to meet the needs of rural and remote communities, but implementation faces diverse and location-specific challenges that can be cultural, technical, practical, and socio-economic, as well as financial in nature. Many community renewable energy systems provided by government are not effectively maintained and fail after several years, remaining inoperable thereafter due to insufficient local technical capability, social disruption and/or financial resources. This paper presents the findings of a transdisciplinary research project that investigated how renewable energy might be most effectively implemented to meet the livelihood needs and aspirations of rural and remote Indonesian communities, with a particular focus on connections and partnerships that crossed spatial, temporal, and governance scales. Data were collected between November 2016 and June 2017 through focus group discussions and interviews with community members, government officers, and NGO practitioners during three rounds of field visits to multiple communities in the central island of Java and the outlying province of North Maluku. The research team comprised academics from leading Indonesian and Australian universities and an Indonesian NGO that has been involved in community development and small-scale renewable energy provision since the 1980s. Disciplinary expertise included social-ecological systems, anthropology, ecological economics, political science, strategic management, finance, urban planning, engineering, and development studies. The study found that health, education, and livelihood concerns are central for communities, while economic development is for government authorities. These different agendas are not always effectively aligned. Community renewable energy can contribute to a range of desirable outcomes, including improved livelihoods, capacity building and empowerment, climate change resilience, and better social-ecological conditions. However, there is a clear need for alternative approaches to local renewable energy provision, with training in technical, operational, and management processes critical, and alternative financial mechanisms necessary. Processes to establish local renewable energy generation systems should therefore integrate consideration of community priorities around health, education, and livelihoods, with capacity building approaches, to facilitate more positive and sustainable outcomes. It is also clear that long-term approaches (including community engagement to understand local needs and opportunities, and ongoing training and maintenance programs) are critical to genuinely effective and sustainable energy development outcomes. The paper considers ways in which partnerships at and between local, district, national, and regional level parties may enable or inhibit the realisation of such community-led priorities and broader sustainable energy development futures.
Keywords:
Sustainable development; transdisciplinarity; community empowerment.
6b. Urban and rural development
