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The Governance of Energy

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Trajectories of Governance

Part of the book series: International Series on Public Policy ((ISPP))

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In addition to the distinction between primary and secondary energy sources, for example the use of coal and oil for heating versus the production of electricity from coal or oil, there are various energy-intensive activities, for example transportation, where it is sometimes difficult to distinguish energy policy from other sectoral policies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Political & Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Giliberto Capano

  2. Department of Politics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Anthony R. Zito

  3. Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Federico Toth

  4. School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Jeremy Rayner

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  1. Giliberto Capano
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  2. Anthony R. Zito
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  3. Federico Toth
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Correspondence to Giliberto Capano .

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Capano, G., Zito, A.R., Toth, F., Rayner, J. (2022). The Governance of Energy. In: Trajectories of Governance. International Series on Public Policy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07457-8_5

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