The urgency of the global pursuit of clean energy is beyond dispute. Yet what receives far less attention is how violently unequal the process of producing clean energy actually is, and how unevenly that inequality distributes across the globe. The supply chains that feed the green transition depend on the extraction of critical minerals sourced overwhelmingly from the Global South. At the commodity frontiers where these minerals are mined and processed, the transition is not clean at all. It is dirty, disruptive, and often violent. Clean energy arrives in the Global North; the environmental and social costs of its production remain behind, concentrated in specific communities that had no say in the arrangements that govern their transformation.
Field research on Chinese nickel investment in Morowali, Central Sulawesi, offers a concrete view of this dynamic. The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), one of the world’s largest integrated nickel processing facilities, is designated as a National Strategic Project (PSN, Proyek Strategis Nasional) and presented by both Indonesian and Chinese officials as a model of “win-win” cooperation. At the national scale, the project registers as a development success: foreign direct investment secured, employment created, raw materials processed domestically.
At the community scale, however, the picture is fundamentally different. Sub-districts like Bahodopi, previously home to small populations relying on subsistence agriculture and fishing, absorbed hundreds of thousands of residents within less than a decade. Rivers that once served as the primary sources of drinking water, became contaminated by mining tailings and industrial effluent. Air quality deteriorated from coal-fired captive power plants. Farmers lost land; fishers found marine resources depleted. Traditional governance structures collapsed under mass in
migration, generating ethnic tensions and social fragmentation. What national statistics record as “employment creation” and “GDP growth,” communities experience as the erosion of subsistence systems that had sustained them for generations.
What emerges from this disjuncture is a pattern that might be termed scalar injustice: a condition in which economic benefits distribute across all political scales—local, provincial, national, and transnational—while social and environmental costs concentrate disproportionately at the lowest scale. In Morowali, the benefits of nickel processing are shared widely: transnational corporations capture profit, the national government records FDI inflows and GDP contributions, the provincial government collects export taxes, and local communities gain employment and rental income. But the socio-environmental costs remain with the communities who live alongside the industrial parks. The injustice is not that local populations receive nothing; they do benefit, and they know it. Yet they also reported environmental degradation, strained public services, and deepening social tensions. They expressed ambivalent sentiment: neither clearly for nor against the investment, but holding both evaluations simultaneously. This ambivalence is not confusion.
It is the lived experience of scalar injustice. People at the local scale experience a dual consciousness produced by receiving real benefits while bearing costs that no one at higher scales shares or even confronts.
Scalar injustice insists on disaggregation. It refuses the convenience of national-level metrics that declare extraction successful while communities experience it as dispossession. It demands that analysis of the green transition ask not only whether it produces benefits, but for whom, at which scale, and at whose expense.
A note on my own position is necessary here: I write this from Universitas Indonesia, in Jakarta, which is the same national scale at which Morowali’s transformation was authorised and celebrated. The scalar lens I apply to the phenomenon implicates me as well. The institutional vantage from which I produce knowledge about Morowali is not the vantage from which Morowali is lived. This does not disqualify the analysis, but it disciplines it: it demands a willingness to move across scales, to hold contradictory realities in tension rather than resolving them into tidy binaries of success or failure, development or exploitation.
The residents of Morowali who now purchase water from rivers their parents drank from freely, yet who also recognise the economic opportunities the investment has brought, are not footnotes in a development success story nor simply victims of extraction. They are people navigating a structurally unjust arrangement with considerable intelligence and limited power. The batteries powering electric vehicles in Beijing, Brussels, and Boston are built on minerals processed in places like Morowali, under governance arrangements that ensure the benefits of that processing travel upward while the costs stay behind. If the world's climate ambitions are to be just and not merely effective, both scholarship and governance must confront the scalar architecture of extraction. Not after the transition is complete, but as a condition of its legitimacy.