Transition pathways and risk analysis for Bioenergy in Indonesia

Governing almost 260 million people dispersed on hundreds of Islands leads to institutional complexities. Indonesia’s form of government is a presidential system where the president is elected directly by the people and draws up legislation together with the parliament (Kawamura 2010) (Kawamura, 2010). There are 34 ministries at national level. The decentralisation policies of the past led to a total of 34 provinces and 82,330 local government units, which all retain certain policy making power(GRAPHIQ, 2016).

The policy architecture itself is also complex. When it comes to climate policy, there is the NDC of Indonesia which sets a 26% emissions reduction target (41% with international help) by 2020 compared to business as usual (Republic of Indonesia, 2015). Nationally, this has been translated into the National Action Plan for Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction (RANGRK) which confirms the objectives stated in the NDC. In the energy sector, the flagship project of the government is the 2014 National Energy Policy (NEP 14) which sets out, amongst other things, a target for the national energy mix. By 2025, 30% of energy should be sourced from coal, 25% from gas, 23% from Renewables and 22% from oil (IEA, 2016). In addition, Indonesia has set an interim target of a 19% share of renewable energies by 2019 (Mittal, 2015).


For the bioenergy sector, the government has put two targets in place: by 2025, 30% of diesel consumption should be met by biodiesel and 25% of gasoline should come from bioethanol. But both climate and energy policies are interacting with other policies such as the National Medium Term Development Plan 2015 – 2019 which seems to place more emphasis on traditional fossil fuel developments than on renewable energies (see below, 2.2.5). Those negative interactions between policies (which were identified as a hindering factor of successful bioenergy upscaling) were also mentioned several times by the participants of an international workshop co-organised by SEI in May 2016 in Bali in the framework of the H2020 projects TRANSrisk and GreenWin. These negative interactions or conflicts may find their root in the country’s significant natural resource endowments that could be exploited for energy, as discussed in Section 2.2.2.

This report was written together with authors from Su-re.co and SEI. This is officially published as Transrisk report, funded by Horizon2020 European Comission. Find out the full version in this link > http://www.transrisk-project.eu/sites/default/files/Documents/D3_2_CaseStudy_Indonesia.pdf