The United Arab Emirates (UAE) wants to invest in a large dam in Indonesia. The dam, called Bulango Ulu, sits in Bone Bolango, in Gorontalo province, on the northern arm of Sulawesi island, north of Bali. The UAE’s ambassador visited the site last month and said UAE companies, including state-owned clean energy firm Masdar, are in talks to add value to the project, most likely by supplying and operating the equipment needed to turn some of the dam’s water flow into electricity. Officials have said the dam should eventually supply water to 880,000 people and irrigate 5,000 hectares of rice fields; some reports have also cited an electricity figure as high as 80 megawatts, though public project documents point to a far more modest hydropower component, in the single digits of megawatts, sized more like a village-scale plant than a utility-scale one. Construction itself, led by Indonesian state contractor Brantas Abipraya, is already more than 85 percent complete.

That timing matters. Bulango Ulu is not a dam Indonesia is deciding whether to build; it is a dam Indonesia has almost finished building, on its own financing, as a national infrastructure project. What the UAE and Masdar are weighing is something narrower and more commercial: whether to invest in the generation equipment that could sit inside or beside it, as a bankable clean-energy asset with a return, not as aid to be redirected elsewhere. That is a sensible, low-risk way for the relationship to begin. The more interesting question is what kind of template this sets for everything the two countries build together after it.

Indonesia’s recent history with large dams is a useful caution for that next stage, even if it arrives too late to reshape Bulango Ulu itself. Look at the Bener Dam, another large dam Indonesia is building, on Java island. To build it, the government needed huge amounts of hard rock for the dam’s walls, and picked a nearby village called Wadas to dig it up. Villagers who did not want their........

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