Gender at the periphery: climate finance, renewable energy, and the limits of technocratic inclusion in Indonesia

Indonesia’s renewable energy transition is mobilising billions in climate finance and projecting 1.7 million new jobs under the Electricity Supply Business Plan (RUPTL 2025-2034). Gender equality is present in this architecture but incorporated into technocratic governance in ways that empty it of transformative content and reproduce the inequalities it nominally addresses. Three structural problems explain this. First, the privileging of bankable showcase renewable energy projects relegates gender to retrofitted action plans, compounded by the absence of binding gender criteria in green bond and transition finance frameworks. Second, the instrumentalisation of empowerment through unregulated CSR obscures a deeper failure: despite women’s strong presence in general education, institutional filters exclude them from the technical fields where renewable energy employment is concentrated. Third, governance responsibility is fragmented across Indonesia’s state electricity company (PLN), developers, and now the sovereign wealth fund (Danantara), so no single actor owns gender outcomes across the value chain. We propose three concrete interventions covering finance standards, contractual obligations, and sectoral accountability to redress these structural issues with gender mainstreaming in Indonesia's renewable energy transition.