Bilateral Climate Governance in Indonesia

As a global issue, climate change has emerged as one of the most challenging problems faced by the international community. The failure of multilateral climate agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015, has put multilateralism in peril. Due to the problems with multilateralism, bilateralism has appeared as an alternative approach to climate governance.
Since 1997, Indonesia has become a strategic partner for seven major bilateral donors aiming to tackle climate change (DNPI, 2009). As the 6th largest carbon emitter in the world, with 70% of deforestation and other forest degradation (DFID, 2014), Indonesia has important effects on climate change. This thesis aims to uncover and analyse the complexities of Indonesian bilateral climate partnerships as they aimed to improve climate governance primarily between 2009 and 2016.
As part of this thesis, I have developed the ‘transformative 4Is+3’ analytical framework. This new analytical approach is used for assessing the complexities of bilateral climate partnerships in order to understand whether transformational change took place in Indonesia during this period. This research uses a qualitative approach, drawing on in-depth interviews from key informants inside and outside Indonesia, as well as documentary sources, in order to build a comparative study of three major bilateral climate donors (Norway, the UK, and Australia).
The central finding of this thesis is that there was only limited evidence that the three major bilateral climate partnerships with Indonesia between 2009 and 2016 had some impact on climate policy transformation. These changes took the form of some minimal substantive changes across the 4I+3 transitions. Among the seven indicators identified in the transformative 4i+3s framework, the factors of institutionalism and leadership change had the most impact across the complexities of bilateral climate partnerships. Overall, however, the bilateral approach to the Indonesian climate change context did not lead to significant climate governance improvements.