Tracking southeast Asian's progress and priorities in the energy transition – A regional energy transition index and analysis framework

Accelerating the energy transition requires identifying its challenges and opportunities and setting priorities holistically. In the context of Southeast Asia, a region poised to become the next centre of gravity for global economic development, we proposed a localized Energy Transition Index (ETI) and applied social network analysis to assess the energy transition progress and priorities across Southeast Asia at both regional and national levels. Our findings suggest that Southeast Asia's energy transition has made progress in development performance, and that most targets are dominated by synergistic interactions (833 out of 1533 indicator pairs). However, the development performance of a target does not always reflect its structural importance in energy transition network. For example, Economic Development is structurally important node in the regional synergy network despite low scores in development performance, while Energy Stability does so in the regional trade-off network despite high scores in development performance. Such misalignments are more evident at the national level. Accounting for both development performance and structural importance, we further identified both common and differentiated priorities at the regional and national levels. Environmental Sustainability and Clean Energy are common priorities across Southeast Asia, even under financial or pandemic shocks. These insights offer policymakers a nuanced understanding of the complexities inherent in energy transitions and provide a methodological foundation for localising the ETI.