Abstract Large-scale nickel extraction continues to accelerate in Morowali, leading to profound transformations in the region’s socioeconomic structures and environmental landscape. While existing studies have primarily focused on the implications of nickel extraction for development, energy transition, or environmental degradation, they often overlook the interconnected dynamics across local, national, and global contexts that shape such transformations. Addressing this gap, this study employs a qualitative case study approach, using document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and spatial analysis to examine Morowali as a strategic site of Indonesia’s downstream nickel industrialization. Drawing on economic geography and critical discourse analysis, the study explores how multi-scalar forces interact in reconfiguring Morowali’s socioeconomic and environmental structures. The findings show that Morowali’s geographic conditions initially enabled its economic transformation, but these are significantly shaped by national industrial policies for downstream processing and global discourses positioning nickel as vital to the energy transition. These forces converge to produce an extractive assemblage that reinforces spatial inequality and socio-environmental injustice. This article concludes that extractive-led development must be understood as embedded within overlapping spatial, political, and discursive relations. It contributes to the literature by offering a multiscalar framework that connects resource extraction, energy transition narratives, and the politics of space in the Global South.
Kasyfilham et al. (Mon,) studied this question.