After the Grid: Renewable Frontiers, the Politics of Life, and the (Un/)Governance of Possible Futures
Convener: Irfan Nugraha
Renewable energy projects are weaving their way across the Indonesian landscape, appearing on dammed lakes, farmland, forest edges, river systems, and nearshore waters. These projects are framed as prompt interventions against the climate crisis. At the sites where they materialize, the first changes are rarely about emissions. Instead, what becomes visible is the orchestration of inclusion, exclusion, and control over energy futures. Patterns of water use begin to shift, land claims are reconsidered, and new procedures determine whose voices and claims are recognized, and whose are sidelined. In this way, renewable infrastructures do not merely alter technical landscapes; they intervene in local relations, reconfiguring rights, responsibilities, and everyday practices.
These landscapes are not empty backdrops. They are shaped by informal land rights, seasonal labor, communal obligations, and local knowledge of soil, water, and weather. Land and water are entwined with care, debt, and expectation. When renewable infrastructures arrive, such as floating solar arrays, geothermal fields, hydropower, or transmission corridors, they do more than change landscapes: they reorder social and material relations. Concession maps define rights, output targets set priorities, environmental assessments translate local ecologies into metrics, and compensation schemes turn layered attachments into money. These mechanisms not only coordinate projects but also determine recognized claims, reshape local knowledge, and require daily practices to fit formal rules and technical standards.
Indonesia’s renewable energy transition is unfolding within a shifting geopolitical landscape, shaped by diverse climate finance and emerging regional alignments. The presence of multiple global actors produce futures that are diverse or equitable on the ground. Project designs continue to follow standardized technical protocols and calculative frameworks. This panel brings these questions into conversation across disciplines, exploring energy transition as an uneven process in which some futures are stabilized while others become fragile. In this sense, renewable frontiers are not just sites of energy production but arenas where the governance of possible futures is enacted in material and everyday life.
This panel seeks to explore:
*How do renewable energy projects shape multiple, overlapping social, material, and ecological realities on the ground?
*Whose voices, knowledge, and claims are heard, and whose are ignored, contested, or marginalized in local and global energy decisions?
*How do global rules, funding, and technical plans interact with local ways of doing, knowing, and living to shape energy futures?
*How are some futures made while others become fragile, and how do people experience, adapt to, or resist these uneven changes?
*How do the promises, risks, and meanings of renewable energy play out differently across communities, practices, and everyday life?