Nexus-thinking in international political economy: what energy and natural resource scholarship can offer international political economy (original) (raw)
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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.
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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,
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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.