The Governance of Energy

Capano, G; Zito, AR; Toth, F; Rayner, J

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-07457-8_5

The Governance of Energy

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Anthony Zito

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Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This chapter begins by outlining the classic goals of energy policy: energy security, energy efficiency and the mitigation of the environmental impacts of energy production and use. It stresses the importance of neoliberal ideas that provided the impulse for deregulation and privatization efforts in a sector that had previously emphasized state ownership of resources and heavily regulated energy markets. The key puzzle is why none of the six case countries can be said to have moved definitively to market governance of energy. The chapter emphasizes both the central importance of institutional constraints and the effect of unpredictable intervening variables, which influence both the costs and the social acceptability of different energy sources. These factors explain why efforts to base energy policy on the assumption that a search for efficiency will necessarily deliver both security and the mitigation of impacts (especially greenhouse gas emissions) have produced a mix of common and unique governance arrangements in the six cases.