ABSTRACT
Addressing the critical links between political structures and renewable energy development in Southeast Asia, this book has offered novel insights into the complexity of environmental governance in emerging economies. Based on empirical findings from the Philippines and Indonesia, an analytical approach was developed that incorporates power theory into a multi-level governance framework. Applied to donor-driven renewable energy projects, this approach allows the challenges to implementing sustainable energy initiatives within complex multi-level governance systems to be mapped. Issues of coordination between jurisdictional levels and aspects related to unevenly distributed power resources and capacities turned out to explain why low-carbon development projects often fail to achieve structural effects despite positive natural, technical and even economic conditions for clean energy technologies. The book started with an in-depth background on renewable energy development around the world and presented major trends in development cooperation. It then developed a power-based multi-level governance approach that is rooted in development thinking. Empirically, the complex energy governance systems in the Philippines and Indonesia were presented in order to identify mechanisms of coordination and power fragmentation that affect sustainable energy activities. Fourteen donor-driven renewable energy projects functioned as in-depth case studies to highlight critical obstacles to their sustainability, including central-local conflicts, complex corruption patterns and the power of veto players at different jurisdictional levels. Having examined how power relations in multi-level governance systems shape the development and dissemination of renewable energy technologies, this work has also shown how the political process of decentralization affects low-carbon development in emerging economies.
