Politics of Green Energy Policy elaborates on the importance of role of the state in driving the green transformation in the energy sector, which is rife with market failures that lock in polluting technologies. It includes an overview of green energy policy measures that can reshape current incentive systems to support the green transformation (these are grouped into mandating, incentivizing, and nudging instruments), pointing to key factors for policy success. It also includes a section on the 'Desirable Conditions for Green Energy Policy', arguing that green energy policy success is subject to three conditions: effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy, and that conditions can be achieved by facilitating societal agreement on the direction of change, forging change alliances, systematic policy learning, and using market mechanisms to manage policy rents and political capture.
The report recognizes that governments need to coordinate with nonstate actors to ensure that the benefits and costs of green transformations are optimized and distributed fairly, and discusses how coordination challenges with nonstate actors can be overcome by managing issues of political economy.
The report includes policy examples taken from the global South and, where illustrative, North, to illustrate how green energy policy challenges play out in reality and how policy makers are coping with them.