Overline: Panels

Headline: The Politics and Policies of Global Energy Transitions

Meeting the Paris climate targets requires the rapid decarbonization of energy systems around the world. Despite the dynamic development of renewable energy markets worldwide, a global transition to sustainable energy remains a deeply political process with far reaching implications. Further changes in policies and regulations are required to enable the development and diffusion of sustainable technologies and to reshape markets to meet the needs of fluctuating renewable energy sources. Social and political support is needed to legitimize ambitious policy solutions at a time of growing support for populist policy approaches. Moreover, as clean energy transitions start to unfold their socio-economic impacts, both evident and anticipated, are giving rise to political struggles at different levels of governance. They range from emerging shifts in the global geopolitics of energy (Van de Graaf and Verbruggen 2015; Overland 2019), to conflicts over energy technology and infrastructure decisions (Kuzemko et al 2019), and new forms of ownership and service delivery at the community-level (Kuzemko 2019).

As pointed out by Sovacool (2017), energy transition processes are characterized by lock-ins and path dependencies, which may slow down the pace of change. At the same, there have been periods of rapid, policy-driven transformation, when technological, institutional and economic adjustments have happened in tandem. How these adjustments are playing out in different countries and regions around the world is subject to increasing scholarly attention (Fankhauser and Jotzo 2017; Kern and Markard 2016; Power et al. 2016; Shen and Xie 2017). Among other things, this work has provoked a return of the discussion on the role of the State, not only in the energy sector but in the economy as a whole (Johnstone and Newell 2017). As pointed out by Mazzucato (2015), governments are frequently the largest risk-taker in the development of new technologies, providing guidance, coordination, and finance. Economic historian, Carlotta Perez (2002), highlights the vital role of the state in ensuring that the benefits of historical transitions were widely distributed across society, helping to engender wide-spread support for change. Other innovation scholars have focused more specifically on the design of policy mixes and strategies (Quitzow, 2015) as well as role of particular policy design features in explaining the effectiveness of policy approaches to induce technological change (Schmidt & Sewerin, 2017). In an emerging discussion on the interaction between policies and technology, scholars are revisiting the scholarship on policy feedbacks, seeking to explain their role both in increasing ambition over time (Meckling et al., 2017), and in decisions to dismantle or even terminate policies (Gürtler et al. 2019)

Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that energy transitions cannot be discussed in isolation from broader socio-economic and political change. The election of populist and nativist politicians in key countries and the increasing pressure emerging from populist parties in Europe are calling into question or even reversing progress towards clean energy targets (Lockwood, 2018). The rise of China and its increasing tensions with the US are beginning to frame political decisions in countries around the world, including decisions on long-term energy investments (Cornell, 2019). Multilateral institutions, needed for coordinated action to decarbonize the energy system, are being increasingly contested, with the most high profile case being the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

These global political trends are interacting with political developments induced by a global energy transition (Lockwood, 2018). Different speeds of investment in low carbon technology and infrastructure are giving rise to global low carbon leaders and laggards, pursuing differing political strategies and giving rise to a new geopolitics of (renewable) energy (IRENA 2019; Lachapelle et al 2017). Countries, such as the US, are being offered extremely different energy visions: a Green New Deal, with its promises of profound, socially just change, and visions that retain the investments, jobs and identities of a fossil-based industrial legacy. Policies to phase-out fossil fuels and renewed efforts to expand energy access in developing countries are giving rise to debates on energy justice (Sovacool et al 2016). Community-level practices and decentralized renewable energy have emerged as arenas and sources of political contestation (Brisbois 2019; Kuzemko 2019).

This Section explores these evolving dynamics of politics and policies in the context of global energy transitions. We welcome contributions that address different levels of governance as well cross-cutting issues related to the interplay between policies, politics and broader processes of energy system transformation and societal change. We seek differing theoretical and methodological approaches that shed light on differing dimensions of the politics and policies of the energy transition.

References

Brisbois, M. (2019), Energy Research & Social Science 50 (2019), 151-161.
Cornell, P. (2019) Energy governance and China’s bid for global grid integration Energy, The Atlantic Council.
Fankhauser, Sam, and Frank Jotzo. 2017. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 9 (1).
Gürtler, K., Postpischil, R., Quitzow, R., 2019, Energy Policy 133.
IRENA (2019) The geopolitics of the energy transformation.
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Kern, Florian, and Jochen Markard. 2016. In The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 391-429.
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