Energy Transition: Implementation and Outcomes Across the States and around the Globe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Governing bodies across scales and sectors set policies promote greener energy as part of the transition to a sustainable future. Despite the pressing need to act, the design and implementation of relevant decarbonization policies varies across states, countries, provinces, and industries. This panel explores the nuances of policy implementation and its impacts on economic and sustainability outcomes in various industries and regional contexts.

The first paper challenges traditional assumptions that fossil fuels are necessary to establishing a reliable energy baseload that supports economic development. The author leverages a panel of manufacturing performance data in combination energy and institutional data from 25 African countries to demonstrate that renewable energy adoption may increase manufacturing performance. These findings support the view that renewable energy can offer leapfrog pathways to sustainable economic development, and calls for energy investments and governance reforms that support industrial-scale use.

The second paper examines the extent to which policy targets are implemented in practice, and whether the practices adopted achieve the desired outcomes. The authors conduct a comparative case study examining data from the 25 largest airlines worldwide to explore differences in how they set and implement policies and practices, that (fail to) achieve decarbonization outcomes that align with the Paris Accords. Their necessary condition analysis (NCA) inductively identifies bottlenecks that can hinder successful implementation of decarbonization policies.

The third paper further explores the conditions under which long-term goals are achieved, analyzing province-level energy transition policies in terms of key policy designs and implementation capacity. The authors use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that interact to increase the proportion of goals achieved. The discussion develops a configurational framework that offers insight to improving policy outcomes by identifying conditions that can substitute or complement one another.

The final paper takes an integrative view of the relationship between renewable energy technologies, environmental impacts, and economic outcomes such as trade dependencies and employment. The authors analyze national outcomes across eleven countries involved in the global solar photovoltaic (PV) supply chain, and conduct scenario modeling to demonstrate divergent outcomes across country emissions, employment, and resilience indicators. These findings challenge assumptions that energy supply chains can be simply optimized, and rather proposes that they are governed through negotiated trade-offs between sustainability, resilience, and economic security.

Taken together, these papers speak to how varied implementation approaches lead to distinct outcomes in the global energy transition. By leveraging unique data from under-explored global contexts, the papers develop novel insight that enhances our ability to implement policies that achieve their intended outcomes in one of the most pressing policy problems of our time.

Policy Area

• Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy

Chair

• Daniel Matisoff, Georgia Institute of Technology

Discussants

• Gang He, Baruch College (City University of New York)

• Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Arizona

Organizer

• Mallory E Flowers, University of Rhode Island

Individual Presentations

• Substitution or Stacking? Energy Transitions, Governance, and Manufacturing Performance in African Emerging Economies - Presenting Author: Kofi Kusi Owusu Ansah, University of Arizona

• Flying Blind: Bottlenecks in Sustainable Aviation - Presenting Author: Olivia Guarinello, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Under what conditions are long-term goals achieved? A configuration analysis of energy transition policies - Presenting Author: Siyang Jiang, Tsinghua University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Xue Gao, Florida State University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Fang Zhang, Tsinghua University

• The solar supply chain trilemma: Sustainability, resilience, and economic opportunity in an era of industrial policy - Presenting Author: Kaifang Luo, Baruch College (City University of New York)