The introduction presents the main theoretical and empirical justifications of the book. It begins by highlighting the longstanding problem governments face as they puzzle over securing adequate amounts of staple foods: either to grow more of the foodstuff or purchase it from abroad. This historical and contemporary food security dilemma sets the stage for introducing the three primary cases of this study, those that struggle to find that ideal balance between promoting expensive domestic rice cultivation and buying cheaper foreign imports. It then explains how success in the Green Revolution radically shifted the views of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia of their position along this continuum. The introduction establishes the significance of the Green Revolution, substantiates its success, and addresses how this legacy over decades has shaped acute rice policy debates – and hence larger questions about rural development, poverty alleviation, and national food security. The introduction closes with a brief recapitulation of the main argument and an outline of the book’s chapters.

The political and economic fortunes of Indonesia’s food parastatal, Bulog, have swayed amid the country’s fluid democracy. Nominal reforms to realize the agency’s autonomy have failed to keep powerholders from exploiting Bulog, signaling continuity with the New Order (1967-98). This chapter examines the post-Soeharto import regime via the wider context of political elite control in order to fund political party activities, which began under the abbreviated yet democratic presidencies of B. J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid. President Megawati Soekarnoputri binged on rice imports to benefit her political allies financially before drastically cutting imports to bolster her pro-farmer image before presidential elections. Her successor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, did likewise, but in reverse order. President Widodo sought to bypass the corruption-plagued Bulog in managing some of his anti-poverty programs to improve their efficiency. Jokowi also turned to the army to enhance food security via rice production through the building of massive army-directed food estates in the country’s outer islands.

This chapter reviews how the Green Revolution unfolded in each of the three countries. It does not shy from reporting the mistakes and mishaps that transpired, from corruption and the hubris of policymakers to pest outbreaks and coercive policy implementation, on the ground. Crucially, the program’s legitimacy was saved by the state-managed, and western funded, rice imports in overcoming food shortages of the early Green Revolution. The chapter then covers how the cultivation surge finally came to fruition, birthing the production nationalists. Two of the more famous examples include Indonesian president Soeharto and Philippine president Marcos. In this way, rice imports, and later Green Revolution production, were decisive factors in prolonging the rule of each of these pro-West, conservative regimes. The chapter is also arranged per case study and chronologically within each case.

After the Second World War, the Australian Army changed from one mainly comprising part-time citizen soldiers to a new generation of Royal Military College-trained officers and professional soldiers, and it witnessed the reraising of the Australian Intelligence Corps. As such, it became part of the army’s first combat deployment of the new Australian Regular Army and its transition from jungle warfare to occupation duties in Japan, to conventional action in Korea (1950–53), and then back to jungle warfare and counterinsurgency operations with the Malayan Emergency, Konfrontasi with Indonesia and the Vietnam War. The Cold War was also dominated by Australian Army operations in a combined arms and joint environment, operating as part of a multinational force and often within a multinational command organisation.

Historians, academics and military officers have viewed the Malayan Emergency as an exemplar of how counterinsurgency warfare should be conducted. Numerous studies and authors dissected British operations in Malaya during and in the aftermath of the war in South Vietnam. They looked for parallels with Vietnam and why Vietnam failed while Malaya was a success. In recent years, some authors have compared the Emergency with British and American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, British troops studied the Malayan insurgency of the 1950s before deploying to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006. According to Australian historian Professor David Horner, the Confrontation with Indonesia was ‘one of the most successful applications of military force in a low-level conflict since the Second World War’ but has been largely ignored and has attracted a dearth of scholarly interest. This has been particularly evident in the role of the Australian forces generally, and especially the Australian Army’s intelligence services.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

This chapter traces the historical junctures that have shaped the political-economic trajectories in those countries. It explains the structural contexts through which environmental movements have emerged as responses to political and economic transformation. The chapter demonstrates how the political-economic structure of the country where they operate has shaped the diverse characteristics of environmental movements in terms of their organisational structures, strategies, and modalities.

This chapter examines the factors which influence the entrepreneurial ecosystems in member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). We present four stylised case studies of successful entrepreneurship featuring Asian unicorns: Bitkub, PrimaKu, Bolttech and Maya. The entrepreneurial ecosystem in Singapore is vibrant, with a growing number of start-ups and venture capital funding sources. Indonesia is seen as the home of somewhat surprisingly successful ventures, whereas the entrepreneurial ecosystems of Thailand and the Philippines are still at an earlier stage of development. The region’s entrepreneurial climate has been continuously improving, facilitating the emergence of more start-ups and a more supportive ecosystem. ASEAN economies embrace digital technologies and leverage them for economic and social advancement. E-commerce businesses in ASEAN have significant growth potential.

Chapter 1 elaborates on how the assemblage of multilateral, bilateral, transnational, and private nongovernmental actors – the clean energy regime complex – interacts with domestic politics in emerging economies and developing countries (EMDEs) to foster energy transitions. The ripple effects of international norms regarding energy transitions are visible in domestic institutional change in Indonesia and the Philippines, but both cases demonstrate variable outcomes in terms of the relative impacts of the clean energy regime complex in removing barriers to geothermal development. The chapter underlines the importance of studying the interaction between the international and domestic politics in EMDEs to understand how best to catalyze energy transitions to meet global climate mitigation goals. The chapter summarizes the case study selection, research design and methods, and theoretical arguments on regime complex effectiveness mechanisms – including utility modifier, social learning, and capacity building, and their impact in overcoming domestic political lock-in. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the book.

The book concludes in Chapter 8 with a summary of the major theoretical and empirical findings on the clean energy regime complex’s emergence and effectiveness across Indonesia and the Philippines, and a discussion of the theory’s broader generalizability, further research opportunities, and policy implications and recommendations for fostering energy transitions in a world of complex governance.

Chapter 4 first outlines the Indonesian case study and summarizes key regulations and actors affecting renewable energy development, and then examines the influence of the regime complex and its impacts on domestic policy adoption and reform in Indonesia in further renewable energy development. This chapter reveals evidence of Indonesia’s adoption of climate mitigation and emissions reduction policy resulting from the clean energy regime complex, specifically social learning, policy diffusion and international pressure on the Indonesian government to reduce emissions in the wake of the COP-13 in Bali.

Chapter 7 provides a comparative analysis of regime complex effectiveness across cases to better perceive the conditions for impact and how intervening variables such as energy crises or domestic political interests mediate effectiveness. Through the three mechanisms – utility modifier, social learning, capacity building – the regime complex has had a notably different impact in moving renewable energy development in Indonesia and the Philippines. This chapter examines and explains the variable outcomes in geothermal development between the Philippines and Indonesia by illuminating the key role of political will at the domestic level. Major findings of this chapter reveal that throughout the case studies, diverging domestic political interests and lack of political will to develop geothermal energy or adopt renewable energy regulations are key in explaining the variation in effectiveness of the clean energy complex across case studies.