Energy policy should take ecological limits into account, align with climate mitigation efforts, and respect communities, not focus solely on economic interests and energy needs.
CAN we realize a National Energy General Plan (RUEN) that is climate-conscious and free from colonialist approaches? This question gives rise to another: have energy policies so far been climate-unconscious and colonialist?
The fact is that energy exploitation has continued in an extractive manner, without taking into account ecological limits, the climate crisis, and communities’ rights to their living spaces, particularly those living in resource-rich areas.
Many policies in this country have been developed in a fragmented manner. Each sector pursues its own targets without considering other sectors. As a result, policy implementation sometimes follows the interests of a single sector without considering its implications for others.
Policies are also often formulated without being based on the voices of people at the grassroots level. A crisis of public participation exists across almost every sector. This is not merely because there are insufficient spaces for public consultation, but also because of unequal power relations and the architecture of policymaking. In practice, implementation often accommodates the interests of investors.
As a result, conflicts over living spaces frequently emerge, triggering human rights violations, declining quality of life, and environmental destruction, including deforestation. The situation is further exacerbated by weak government oversight and law enforcement, as well as inadequate parliamentary oversight.
The extractive paradigm has long positioned natural resources and space as objects of development, investment, and economic accumulation, driving an ever-growing appetite for natural resource exploitation in the name of meeting energy needs and generating state revenues.
Take coal, for example. Over the past six years, national coal production has averaged 100 percent of its annual target. Likewise, non-tax state revenue targets from the sector have averaged 100 percent of their annual targets.
These achievements have come at the cost of conflicts over living spaces among communities around mining areas, declining quality of life, massive deforestation, and neglected reclamation obligations after mining operations end.
According to records from the Agrarian Reform Consortium (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria/KPA), coal mining has triggered agrarian conflicts involving evictions, land grabbing, criminalization, and violence against communities. In line with this, the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) has stated that mining threatens communities’ living spaces.
Coal mining has also contributed to deforestation and ecological destruction, directly contradicting the climate mitigation agenda. Data from Auriga in Indonesia’s Deforestation Status 2025 recorded thousands of abandoned mining pits that have yet to be reclaimed, resulting in fatalities in East Kalimantan.
National energy policy still positions fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. This means that land-based extraction, such as coal mining, will continue to be pushed forward—not only to meet energy needs, but also to generate state revenue through exports.
Indonesia has become an energy supplier for global industrial machinery and consumption. At the same time, in the name of the energy transition, the development of electric vehicles requires critical minerals, driving aggressive mining and downstream processing, including on small islands and in vulnerable areas.
Indonesia faces structural pressure from global supply chains to remain an extraction zone for economic needs beyond its own territory. An energy transition that should move away from the extractive model risks reproducing that same model in a new form.
Global investment pressures and trade agreements risk placing Indonesia in a weak bargaining position, potentially leading to the relaxation of environmental and social protection standards in order to maintain competitiveness, attract capital, and meet the needs of global mineral supply chains.
The development of renewable energy also presents significant challenges. The ambition to develop biomass co-firing using palm oil for coal-fired power plants is increasingly putting pressure on spatial planning and land governance.
It is therefore time to reform energy policy by taking these issues into account. The energy sector should not be viewed merely as a means of meeting energy needs and generating state revenue. It must also be approached comprehensively, taking ecological limits into account, aligning with climate mitigation efforts, and genuinely respecting communities’ rights over the use of their living spaces. These considerations have been neglected for far too long.
RUEN, therefore, needs to take these impacts into account and prevent energy development from exacerbating land conflicts and environmental degradation that ultimately move communities further away from prosperity. Article 33 of the 1945 Constitution must not be used merely to legitimize the exploitation of natural resources. The provision should affirm management that is equitable, sustainable, and environmentally sound, while also safeguarding communities’ rights to their livelihoods and to a good and healthy environment, as stipulated in other constitutional provisions.
Spatial planning for energy development must take into account groups that have historically been marginalized by policy. These include Indigenous Peoples, farmers, fishers, low-income communities, women, and other vulnerable groups, particularly those living in resource-rich areas.
RUEN needs an instrument to regulate the pace of mining expansion so that it aligns with the climate change mitigation agenda. This could include curbing deforestation and ecological destruction, among other measures, by limiting coal production based on domestic needs rather than export interests.
A moratorium on mining permits is needed in areas that are critical to livelihoods and ecological functions, such as forests, water sources and watersheds, coastal areas, and karst landscapes.
Equally important, emissions transparency and beneficial ownership tracking must become mandatory requirements under RUEN. Information on emissions, contracts, permits, and beneficial owners should be disclosed, verified, regularly updated, and easily traceable by the public to strengthen oversight and prevent conflicts of interest. Without the courage to correct the direction of this policy, Indonesia’s emissions reduction targets and climate commitments on the global stage will remain nothing more than empty rhetoric.
In the past, our nation was colonized by other nations. Through political domination and economic exploitation, land and natural resources were seized and controlled solely for the benefit of those in power. People were forced to submit to the rules of the colonizers. We must not allow the character of colonialism to remain embedded in state policies after independence.
Source: Tempo