Introduction: Bringing Energy into International Political Economy (original) (raw)
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Bringing energy into International Political Economy
Europe and Russia provides substantial explanations and analyses of transitions, change and uncertainty in energy issues in the broad region of Europe and Russia. The book focuses on questions of energy governance and approaches this topic from an international political economy (IPE) perspective. As such, this represents an attempt to bring energy back into the mainstream of IPE.
Setting the field of International Political Economy of Energy
Contexto Internacional
Predominantly since the 2000s, energy-related policy initiatives steadily grew across several scales, from local to national and international arenas, devoted to the transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy. Such policies, stemming from renewable sources, would be meant to curb our civilization's carbon lock-in. At the same time, policies continued to pursue old tasks, like promoting energy security and access. Consistently, one observes the rise of a massive corpus of grey literature, including national policy plans, corporate and institutional reports. How does academic literature examine this raw material? How are those emerging themes and initiatives valued? Editors Thijs Van de Graaf (Ghent Institute for International Studies, Belgium), Benjamin K. Sovacool and Florian Kern (University of Sussex, UK), Arunabha Ghosh (Council on Energy, Environment and Water) and Michael Klare (University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA) take the challenge. They convene expertise and competences on energy studies with respect to states, markets and institutions of dozens of scholars from top universities, research institutions, scientific academies, and multilateral organizations, from a variety of academic backgrounds, in the fields of Geography, Political Sciences, Law,
New directions in the international political economy of energy
Review of International Political Economy, 2019
Until relatively recently international political economy (IPE) scholarship on energy has tended to focus on oil, rather than energy understood in its full, current diversity through IPE's tripartite liberal, realist or critical lenses. Over the past decade or so there have, however, been far-reaching transformations in the global economy, not least in response to the increased recognition, and visibility, of damaging manifestations of fossil fuel usage and human-induced climate change. In the light of such changes this article, and the special section as a whole, represents a distinctive departure from earlier IPE of energy traditions by collectively deepening our understanding of how the IPE of energy is changing: in scalar, material, distributional and political terms. An appeal is made for greater engagement by IPE scholars with energy, given its wide-ranging relevance to debates about climate change, development, technology and equity and justice.
Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy: Fifteen Contentious Questions
2016
Energy policy is a jargon-laden field that grapples with complex systems and wicked problems. Analyzing energy policy through a single dimension typically yields incorrect and misleading results. Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy seeks to cut through this incomprehensibility by presenting 15 dilemmas in the field of energy policy through a point, counterpoint format followed by a synthesis. The book covers four themes: energy and society (i.e., the role for the state versus the market, energy efficiency), energy resources and technology (i.e., peak oil, shale gas, electric cars, and biofuels), climate change, and energy security and energy transitions. Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy was written as an accessible undergraduate textbook. It succeeds in being free of jargon and understandable to students or interested laypeople without a background in energy. While energy policy experts will find little new information, the breadth of the book and the research underpinning it is nevertheless impressive. It reflects a substantial effort to compile reams of information in a fair and balanced way. Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy fills an important gap by providing an accessible undergraduate energy policy textbook. There are a small handful of energy policy textbooks, but all have limitations. For example, Goldthau and Witte's Global Energy Governance is broad in scope and makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature, but as a textbook, it focuses unduly on the single paradigm of International Relations liberalism (Goldthau & Witte, 2010). Yergin's The Prize is the authoritative history on oil, but it focuses only on hydrocarbons instead of covering important contemporary issues, such as climate change and renewable energy transitions (Yergin, 2011). A course instructor in an International Relations department may find Energy and the Transformation of International Relations (Wenger, Orttung, & Perovic, 2009) somewhat more advantageous, as it is more focused on global case studies and concepts than Sovacool and others' book. However, it lacks the systematic coverage of a variety of viewpoints on energy policy issues that Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy provides; moreover, the book is $90 in hard copy. Additionally, there are several available handbooks on energy security, including Sovacool's own Routledge Handbook of Energy Security (Sovacool, 2011) and Trombetta and Dryer's International Handbook of Energy Security (Trombetta & Dryer, 2013). These two texts work well for courses specifically focused on energy security, but as many departments add broader survey courses on energy policy, Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy is more comprehensive in scope and more accessible.
2016
In the new collection Energy, Capitalism and World Order: Towards a New Agenda in International Political Economy, editors Tim Di Muzio and Jesse Salah Ovadia bring together contributors to examine the relationship between energy, capitalism and the world order in light of pressing and emergent issues such as fracking, biofuels and climate change. While more attention on the diverse challenges faced by different political economies would have been welcome, this collection presents lucid analyses and grounded case studies that will be of use to scholars, students and policymakers, finds Donn David P. Ramos.
International Political Economy: A Field Born of the OPEC Crisis Returns to Its Energy Roots
Energy Research & Social Science, 2014
International Political Economy is a multidisciplinary field which officially falls under the political science discipline. IPE of energy is a nascent field to which scholars have only recently started to identify. IPE scholarship generally focuses on issues where politics and economics intersect, and looks at a variety of actors, including individuals, states, and international organizations. Since IPE’s official founding in the 1970’s, following the energy crises and the end of the gold standard, most energy research has focused on issues related to oil, such as OPEC, the “resource curse,” oil companies, and domestic policies related to oil. We suggest a number of promising areas for research: on the theoretical side, making politics explicit and incorporating international organizations, regionalism, community interests, international structure, ideas and identity and environmental studies into IPE scholarship. We also suggest three issue areas–renewable and other energy sources, electricity, and sovereign wealth funds.
Introduction to the Special Issue: Governing Energy in a Fragmented World
Global Policy, 2011
This special issue brings together leading experts from Asia, Europe and North America to examine the international institutions, national governance mechanisms and financing systems that together will determine the future of the energy sector. The enormous environmental externalities imposed by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the devastating corruption and human rights abuses that have accompanied this energy system, and the geopolitical vulnerabilities that have arisen because of the uneven natural distribution of these resources, have occasioned enormous handwringing-but not, yet, a shift to a more rational system of providing energy services. Although national governments play the dominant role in energy governance, these challenges are beyond the scope of any single national government to manage, making energy policy a key component of global governance and international relations.
The Nexus between Energy and Politics: Review of Brenda Shaffer’s ‘Energy Politics’
2018
According to Pascaul (2015), energy and geopolitics have always been entwined. This current époque has so far recorded how controlling energy resources determines who wins a war, oil states have collaborated to establish alliances, and how price fluctuations have enhanced or dampened hegemonic activities. The 21 st century's comprehensive and fast-paced changes in the energy faculty are now modifying the linkage between the two disciplines. The arrival of new raw materials and subsequent formulation of new geopolitical policies, and with climate change concerns becoming the centre of international relations, little effort has been made to develop a clear strategy that assists societies, economies and policymakers to outline new challenges where geopolitics and energy intertwine. To borrow the references of oil and gas, it would be discovered that foreign policy and fuel markets constantly transform. As a result, it is highly imperative to comprehend the ways in which foreign affairs and fuel markets intersect by comprehending the relationship between the two. Brenda Shaffer, in Energy Politics (2009), discussed the link between international politics and energy. Her discussion concentrated on oil and gas politics because in her contestation, as opposed to alternative energy resources, the production, transportation and supply of oil and gas are intertwined with international politics. A country's aptitude to obtain energy resources and the methods through which it consumes energy determinedly structure its economic and trade systems, nature and longevity of its environment, and national security. Moreover, energy supply policies are a feature of a state's political arsenal in the same strength as international policy, military power and economic tools. States are similarly predisposed to utilise the 'energy weapon' to bolster interests in the same manner as they can utilise military or financial power.
Governing global energy: existing approaches and discourses
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2011
Soaring demand for fossil fuels, stemming from new consumer heavyweights coincides with an urgent need to decarbonize global energy systems. At the same time, providing the 'bottom billion' with access to modern forms of energy is a humanitarian imperative as much as it is making energy systems sustainable. Managing these intertwined challenges requires effective governance on a global scale. This article lays out the main challenges that need to be addressed during the looming energy transition process; based on that, it reviews the existing literature in the fields of international relations, global (public) policy and global governance dealing with these challenges. It argues that the subject of global energy governance remains understudied; that existing scholarly works are characterized by a lopsided attention to the selected aspects of global energy instead of accounting for the intertwined challenges of security, climate change and energy access; and that, as a consequence, further and more holistic research is urgently needed.