BRICS Wants a Green Industrial Revolution. Indonesia Shows What It Takes
Indonesia’s decision to become the first full member of BRICS from Southeast Asia raised questions about its geopolitical alignment, particularly its relationship with China. Some observers may see its close ties with Beijing, especially given the intensive exchanges of the past year, as potentially compromising BRICS’ principle of political non-alignment. Indonesia’s substantial engagement with China, including through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), reinforces this interpretation.
Yet this reading overlooks Indonesia’s broader ambition: to turn the green transition into a strategy for economic growth and industrial development. As a resource-rich country, Indonesia has traditionally occupied a lower position in global value chains, supplying raw materials. This leaves the country in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis foreign investors who have played a significant role in processing and manufacturing.
Its current objective is to convert resource wealth into productive capacity, manufacturing capabilities, jobs and greater economic self-reliance. In other words, the green transition is seen as an opportunity to boost growth and accelerate modernisation. For Indonesia, the significance of BRICS extends beyond geopolitics to the practical challenge of achieving economic transformation through industrial development.
The energy dilemma
Green energy transition is high on Indonesia’s agenda. On the one hand, this is a challenge the country faces, as do many across Southeast Asia, where energy demand is increasing as urbanisation and industrialisation accelerate. Although the country is looking to expand clean energy deployment, it is also constrained by structural factors. Meeting rising electricity demand and upgrading its energy system will require substantial investment.
On the other hand, Indonesia’s industrialisation is creating additional demand across the energy system. The country faces the difficult task of meeting rising energy needs while also pursuing a cleaner and more sustainable growth pathway. This tension helps explain why Indonesia remains dependent on its domestic coal resources. Coal demand in Indonesia was projected by the International Energy Agency to rise by 7 percent in 2025, to 268 million tonnes, primarily to satisfy demand for power generation.
The policy challenge is to expand industrial capacity and employment while transforming the energy system that supports this growth. Capturing more of the value created by the green transition remains a clear ambition, particularly for a country that has historically served primarily as a supplier of resources.
What Indonesia wants from BRICS
Indonesia sees BRICS as one platform to advance its agenda. In President Prabowo Subianto’s framing of a “green century,” Indonesia sees an opportunity to turn its significant critical mineral and energy sources into growth. The green economy is viewed as a pathway to both climate resilience and national development.
To Indonesia, the priority is to build domestic capabilities, strengthen its position in supply chains and gain greater influence over the rules governing the green economy. Technology transfer is particularly important, given the different industrial and technological strengths represented within BRICS.
Indonesia seeks continued cooperation with China on investment, infrastructure, technology and industrial know-how, but increasingly directs it towards domestic manufacturing, skills and supply-chain development rather than greater dependence on imported products and external capital.
BRICS also offers options beyond China. India presents potential cooperation in areas such as digital technologies, data centres and semiconductors, while other BRICS members provide different markets, resources and technological capabilities.
Indonesia’s interest also extends to rule-setting. Along with other BRICS countries, it desires greater influence over carbon border measures, carbon management, trade rules and critical minerals, alongside other issues shaping the global green economy.
For Indonesia, green industrialisation is therefore simultaneously an economic, strategic and geopolitical project. It concerns its industrial competitiveness, economic sovereignty and the ability to influence the rules under which future growth takes place.
The China element
China offers Indonesia an important reference point for what industrial policy can accomplish. Through manufacturing capacity, integrated supply chains and technological upgrading, China has demonstrated how industrial development can create economic opportunities while supporting the expansion of green technologies.
Indonesia is particularly interested in China’s industrial parks, which benefit from concentrated infrastructure, investment and manufacturing capabilities while facilitating the development of supply chains. Through the Two Countries, Twin Parks model, Indonesia seeks to translate Chinese investment into local manufacturing, skills development and technological capabilities.
This represents selective learning rather than wholesale replication. Indonesia’s development strategy smartly reflects its own geography, population, institutions and resource base. It aims to use Chinese investment and technology to build domestic capabilities while reducing excessive dependence on Chinese capital, supply chains and markets.
China is deeply embedded in the industrial system Indonesia wants to develop, making cooperation valuable. Yet this dependence strengthens the case for diversifying partnerships and expanding domestic capabilities. Indonesia has sought to preserve room for manoeuvre while cooperating closely with China. Strategic autonomy, in this context, means having sufficient alternatives so that dependence remains a choice rather than a constraint.
BRICS could help create that space, but only if it expands Indonesia’s options rather than deepening its reliance on its largest member. The country is therefore testing whether it can combine cooperation with China, diversification through India and other BRICS members, ASEAN-based market and rule-making, and a stronger voice in shaping global green standards.
What Indonesia reveals about BRICS
Indonesia’s experience suggests that BRICS should be understood through the interests of its wider membership, rather than only through the ambitions of China and India.
China may view the grouping as a vehicle for greater global influence, while India may use it to advance strategic autonomy. For countries such as Indonesia, the more immediate concern is whether BRICS can expand economic choices, improve access to investment and technology, and support domestic development priorities.
This may help explain why more Global South countries have sought to join the expanded BRICS. Many face a similar combination of pressures: the need for economic growth and industrialisation, greater resilience in a fragmented global economy, access to technology and investment, and more influence over the rules shaping trade and the green transition.
They may not share China’s or India’s geopolitical ambitions, but they can still see value in a platform that gives them greater room to pursue their own priorities.
This is where the appeal of BRICS may lie: not in political convergence, but in the possibility of selective cooperation among countries with different interests, development models and technological capabilities.
The challenge is particularly significant when members possess unequal economic and technological capabilities. Cooperation can reproduce existing asymmetries unless it changes the terms on which finance, investment and knowledge are accessed.
For many Global South countries, economic growth remains a central rationale for engaging with the green transition. Decarbonisation matters, but so do jobs, infrastructure, productive capacity and higher incomes. A transition that delivers emissions reductions without broader economic gains may have limited political and developmental appeal.
BRICS as a multilateral platform
Indonesia’s experience also suggests that the significance of BRICS may lie in how its members use the platform. Its relevance will depend on whether countries with different priorities can translate broad commitments into practical forms of cooperation. These could include improved access to finance, technology partnerships, industrial development, skills, and coordination on green economy rules. However, it also means that outcomes depend heavily on the willingness and capacity of individual members to cooperate.
BRICS will be judged by its ability to manage differences and produce tangible benefits for less powerful members. This is also the case for Indonesia; it seeks closer cooperation with China, but also diversification through India and other partners. It wants to build domestic industrial capabilities while retaining access to global investment and markets. And it seeks a stronger role in shaping the rules governing trade and the green economy. Nevertheless, achieving these objectives also calls for the country to actively participate in this multilateral platform, without assuming that these objectives can be delivered automatically by the platform itself.
Indeed, for BRICS, the challenge is to translate this principle into practical economic cooperation. The grouping may offer emerging and middle powers greater agency in an increasingly fragmented economic and trade environment. But its flexibility is both an opportunity and a limitation. Its future relevance will depend on whether it can help members expand their capabilities and choices.
The Bandung Conference offers a useful historical reference point. Led by Indonesia, Asian and African countries with different interests came together to pursue greater agency through collective action. For BRICS, the lesson is that political differences may not disappear, and that diversity must translate into practical benefits and greater agency for participating countries.
Nevertheless, the future appeal of BRICS remains to be seen. As a platform, its strength will be measured by its ability to deliver tangible benefits for members with diverse capabilities. This expectation rests on the understanding that BRICS does not depend on political alignment to remain relevant.
This article written by Dr. Lei Xie, Senior Specialist at the E3G in London and leads the climate diplomacy initiatives focused on China and Asia. Lei offers a seasoned perspective on how environmental science meets public policy. She specialises in policy-driven advocacy for sustainable development, drawing on her deep roots in academia, industry and government. She has authored books including China’s International Transboundary Rivers: Politics, Security and Diplomacy of Shared Water Resources (Routledge, 2018) and a monograph, Environmental Activism in China (Routledge, 2009). Lei holds a PhD in Environmental Science from Wageningen University, an MPhil from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a BA from Peking University.
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