Southeast Asia

Coal is now more expensive than renewable energy – and while this is good news for the climate, it’s bad news for developing countries who have invested in coal. Renato Redentor Constantino looks at how Japan and Korea are divesting, and the IMF’s opinion on stranded assets.

Southeast Asia is urbanizing rapidly, with cities in the region growing five times faster than in other regions of the world. As in most of Asia, urban growth in the region in the coming decades is projected to occur mainly in smaller urban centres. These cities, however are often highly vulnerable to the risks posed by climate change, particularly floods, droughts, and sea-level rise, because of their geographical locations.

Two narratives dominate the debate on the expansion of the oil palm cultivation. The first narrative focuses on the destruction of forest or agroforestry systems and their transformation into oil palm monoculture plantations. The second narrative shows how oil palm cultivation improves the livelihoods of rural households by increasing their income and nutrition. Both narratives are supported by scientific evidence, and they need to be thought together when aiming to improve the ecological and economical sustainability in the production areas.

Welcome to this podcast by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. It is part of the ’State of Democracy in Southeast Asia’ series, and this is your host, Johanna Son. In this episode, we take a look at the elections lined up in the region. Can democratic mechanisms like elections lead to more authoritarian rule? We step back to look at what this trend says about the quality of the democracies in our midst.

This article reveals hidden solutions for the haze problems known to terrorize some ASEAN countries through a less-discussed perspective: business-oriented solution. After showing the attempts to solve this problem from the global, regional, local, and business levels, this article shows the gross results of each method.

While observers of the state of democracy agree that democracy has been in decline in the recent years, its trajectory in the Southeast Asian region has at least shown mixed results. Elections are still treated as the ultimate yardstick for “democracy” in Southeast Asia.

Island Southeast Asia is well-known as a hotbed of mega-biodiversity. But where rainforests meet thriving marine habitats is exactly where numerous large developments are built. Ranging from luxury homes to resorts to industrial areas and ports, coastal infrastructure projects often require dredging, reclamation or the complete destruction of coastal habitats.

A revolution took place in Malaysia on May 9, 2018. It was a silent and peaceful one, amazingly achieved through the ballot box, and is therefore not noticed for what it is. But it is a revolution nevertheless, and the effects of it are moving like a strong undercurrent throughout the nation—cutting down old structures, be these mental ones, social ones or political ones. A sense of jubilation and disorientation now permeates the country, and will do so for a few weeks yet, if not months.

On 2 December 2016, about 800,000 Muslim protestors hit the streets of Jakarta to demand the arrest of the Christian-Chinese governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, aka “Ahok”. The largest in a series of such protests since October 2016, it was labelled “Defending Islam Acts”. The crowd accused Ahok of blasphemy, alleging that a speech he made in September 2016 had insulted Islam. As the result of this protest Ahok, who at the time was running for re-election, saw his polling numbers drop significantly. Conversely, the hard-line Muslim groups and politicians driving the protest enjoyed new heights of public attention.

In recent years, voters have increasingly chosen populist leaders from the left and from the right. An increasing number of elected populist leaders can be found in countries with long democratic traditions and history. It might be less surprising to find populist leaders in countries that are purportedly democratic but without necessarily having strong liberal democratic traditions.