Fragmented Energy Governance and the Provision of Global Public Goods
| Author | Gonzalo Escribano |
| Date | 01 May 2015 |
| Published date | 01 May 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12195 |
Fragmented Energy Governance and the
Provision of Global Public Goods
Gonzalo Escribano
Spanish Open University (UNED) and Elcano Royal Institute of International Studies
Abstract
This article analyses global energy governance from an international political economy and global public goods (GPG)
perspective. It first describes the fragmentation that characterises energy governance and its current trend towards an
increasingly inter-polar and polycentric pattern. Then, it shows how the myriad of dedicated international energy
regimes conform to an energy regime complex that provides a diverse set of GPG rather than a single international
energy regime. Then, global energy governance is analysed from a global public good angle, (1) categorizing the differ-
ent institutional energy-related arrangements according to the public good they intend to provide; and (2) highlighting
that the supply of such institutional arrangements is greatly influenced by the different provision technologies that are
applied to the different energy-related global public goods.
Policy Implications
•International energy institutions are obsolete, unable to govern an inter-polar world and lag behind the new idea-
tional dimensions of global energy governance.
•The efficient supply of different energy-related global public goods (GPG) requires institutional arrangements to be
consistent with their respective optimal provision technologies.
•This in turn demands differentiated institutional designs for GPG provision, i.e. new international organizations,
informal arrangements or global standards multilaterally or unilaterally promoted.
•In the absence of a homogeneous international regime, a polycentric regime complex can strengthen the links
between differentiated arrangements and ease coordination problems.
This article addresses global energy governance from an
international political economy perspective. While global
energy matters tended to be analysed mainly through a
geopolitical prism, there is growing literature dealing
with different aspects of global energy governance, from
fighting against climate change and energy poverty
to improving the governance of energy resources.
1
Together with the emergence of new global producers
and consumers, this expanding agenda has made global
energy governance far more complex than just manag-
ing oil interdependency among Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) producers and
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-
ment (OECD) consumers (Florini and Dubash, 2011).
This article aims to contribute to this expanding litera-
ture in two ways. First, through an international political
economy approach that follows the strand of literature
starting with Kehoane (1984) and his analysis of the
International Energy Agency (IEA) as an international
regime to provide supply security to OECD oil consum-
ers. It also follows its recent developments adopting the
energy regime complex concept as proposed by Colgan
et al.(2013), as well as the literature devoted to the
analysis of the EU’s energy security from an international
political economy perspective.
2
Second, the article develops the research agenda that
considers global energy governance as a problem of
cooperation to provide energy-related public goods
(Escribano and Garc
ıa-Verdugo, 2011; Goldthau, 2012).
Climate change has probably been the issue that has
concentrated a greater deal of research in the global
public goods (GPG) literature (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al.,
2012), practically becoming a sub-area in itself, and will
not be dealt with here. Other common pool goods like
energy infrastructures have also been explored (Goldt-
hau, 2014). The demand for more ‘normative’GPG has
steadily increased over the last number of decades, leav-
ing existing global energy governance mechanisms
Global Policy (2015) 6:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12195 ©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 2 . May 2015 97
Research Article
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