Publications

Climate policy has entered a new era as public investment is increasingly moving to center stage, including recovery spending and long-term climate investment plans. While essential for decarbonization, public investment is not enough – the carrots of investment need to go hand in hand with regulatory sticks. Public investment in clean technologies and infrastructure does not guarantee decarbonization outcomes. Yet, climate regulation, particularly high and comprehensive carbon prices, has remained elusive in the United States and many other parts of the world. Against this backdrop, the big public investment push offers a political opportunity of government leverage. Governments can tie climate requirements to public investment as part of a ‘green bargain.’ At the core of these arrangements is reciprocity – linking carrots to sticks – to ensure public investment leads to technological change and emission reductions. Drawing on the experience with ‘reciprocal control mechanisms’ in public investment among late industrializers, this paper advances our understanding of green bargains. It examines the historical precedents of green bargains, introduces a typology, and offers an empirical overview based on an original dataset of implemented and proposed green bargains. We then focus on the design choices related to leverage, scope, and accountability to make green bargains effective at technological learning and advancing decarbonization. The article concludes with a discussion of US and international policy fora that can serve as platforms to develop green bargains as public climate investments expand.

Exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM2.5) currently contributes to millions of global premature deaths every year. Here, we assess the pollution and health futures in five 2015–2100 scenarios using an integrated modelling framework. On the basis of a global Earth System Model (GFDL-ESM4.1), we find lower ambient PM2.5 concentrations, both globally and regionally, in future scenarios that are less fossil fuel-dependent and with more stringent pollution controls. Across the five scenarios, the global cumulative PM2.5-related deaths vary by a factor of two. However, the projected deaths are not necessarily lower in scenarios with less warming or cleaner air. This is because while reducing PM2.5 pollution lowers the exposure level, increasing the size of vulnerable populations can significantly increase PM2.5-related deaths. For most countries, we find that changes in socio-demographic factors (for example, ageing and declining baseline mortality rates) play a more important role than the exposure level in shaping future health burden.

Declining levelized costs of renewable energy have become a driving force in supporting renewable energy in India; the levelized cost of wind and solar has plummeted to between 3.3¢/kWh and 4¢/kWh. However, limited research exists on the impacts of renewables on the finances of Indian distribution utilities. The present study examines the financial impact of incremental penetration of the hydro, solar, and wind alternative in the generation mix of the distribution company of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Using real-time 15-min interval data and a merit-order-dispatch model, the study quantifies the merit-order-effect and assess the potential savings from renewables. The results indicate that depending upon the penetration level under demand growth cases, renewable integration could lower the power purchase cost of Indian utilities by up to 11%. Wind produces most savings between 0.11¢/kWh and 2.71¢/kWh followed by solar −0.17¢/kWh and 2.56¢/kWh and hydro −0.32¢/kWh and 2.05¢/kWh. The savings will increase with rising electricity demand and plummeting costs of renewables. Integrating moderate levels of renewables no longer presents economic-environment trade-offs and can simultaneously meet multiple policy goals of energy affordability and environmental sustainability.

Energy access delivers broad socio-economic benefits, but few studies have examined how benefits are allocated within the household. Here we conduct a large-scale survey with 4,624 respondents across six Indian states to provide results on intra-household differences across multiple outcome dimensions of energy service, including knowledge, satisfaction, utilization and opinion. Using a Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) to measure household-level gender equality, we find that women in low-WEI households are less aware of energy services and use less electricity than their spouses. This awareness gap manifests in differences in satisfaction, as women in higher-WEI households show more concern with energy services and fuel sources. Overall, these results signify that the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of providing energy access may not effectively meet the goal of sustainable energy for all. Bridging the gender gap through targeted information and learning campaigns that empower and educate women could unlock additional support for sustainable energy policies.

Given that climate change is one of the biggest risks facing the real economy as well as the financial industry, there is an urgent need to measure and manage this risk. One way to measure this risk is the carbon exposure of products and their corresponding supply chains. While the process of measuring and managing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions is well established, the same cannot be said of Scope 3 emissions. This article first provides an overview of frameworks for measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions in an ideal world, where product-level marginal emission factors are known with certainty. It then lays out the issues surrounding the measurement and management of uncertain Scope 3 emissions. It also discusses the progress made so far on these issues, provides recommendations, and lays out a research agenda for future work.

As the global economy transitions to greater reliance on renewable energy, it is crucial that this be a Just Transition in which new jobs are created to offset reduced opportunities in fossil fuels. This is critical to mitigate political opposition to the renewable energy transition. We use a survey experiment in Jharkhand, one of India’s largest coal-producing states, to identify the characteristics that make alternative jobs attractive compared to coal jobs. We provide evidence of a coal penalty: respondents were 36.2 percentage points [95% CI: 33.1–39.5] less likely to choose coal jobs than alternatives. Additionally, respondents were much more likely to select high-paying jobs, while distance was not a strong deterrent to job selection. The findings indicate that coal jobs are unpopular on the margin, and suggest the viability of policies such as jobs training programs and relocation assistance that allow workers to take advantage of higher-skilled, higher-paid livelihoods.

In the context of reaching our climate targets—for example, the 2°C target set at Paris—the role of transition finance, and therefore transition bonds, is going to be key. This article provides a discussion of the goals, issues, and guiding principles for transition bonds. It first argues that a comprehensive transition bonds framework needs to align with appropriate climate transitions, allow for flexibility in getting to climate goals, and minimize greenwashing. The article then offers a simple transition bond rating framework based on the stringencies of climate targets as well as transition pathways. In this process, the crucial roles of sector-based approaches, offsets, regulations, and data quality are also discussed. In addition, the article sets out a research agenda, including identifying potential transition pathways, developing methodologies for additionality of proposed interventions, and creating regulation to ensure transparency.

In the context of climate change, developing countries with sizeable coal capacities; such as South Africa, Chile and India; are exploring coal plants retirements by repurposing them for productive uses. However, a framework to establish the economic rationale for repurposing does not exist. We develop a detailed cost-benefit framework for the same; for three applications – solar energy, battery energy storage and synchronous condenser; and apply it to a representative coal plant in India. Our findings reveal a strong economic rationale for repurposing. First, the present value of repurposing benefits outweigh corresponding decommissioning costs – the direct, indirect and total decommissioning costs are $58.11 million, $45.80 million and $103.91 million, respectively; the corresponding gross benefits from repurposing are $122.79 million, $468.03 million and $590.82 million, respectively. Second, even after excluding social benefits, net benefits of repurposing cover 10%–32% of capital expenditure of the repurposing options. Third, decommissioning costs are about 50% for coal plants in India (at $58 million) vis-à-vis plants in the US (at $117 million). Finally, we provide a methodology for selecting plants for repurposing; based on age, energy charges and qualitative factors. Our methods will serve as a template for coal plant repurposing in developing countries.

Governments are spending unprecedented amounts to escape the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, the G20 group of the 20 largest economies spent at least US$14 trillion — close to China’s annual gross domestic product. Much of that total, rightly, went to shoring up health-care systems, wages and welfare. But climate action was widely promised, too — including ‘green new deals’ and ‘building back better’.

Our analysis suggests that, so far, those promises have not been met. We created an inventory of fiscal stimulus spending during the COVID-19 pandemic in G20 economies, and classified measures according to their likely impacts on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Overall, we found that only 6% of total stimulus spending (or about $860 billion) has been allocated to areas that will also cut emissions, including electrifying vehicles, making buildings more energy efficient and installing renewables. Worse, almost 3% of stimulus funding has targeted activities that are likely to increase global emissions, such as subsidizing the coal industry. And there’s been little change in strategies as nations have shifted from economic rescue mode during lockdowns to recovery, as shops and other businesses have reopened.

Here we outline our findings, lessons and research priorities. We call on all governments to combine economic and climate objectives in upcoming recovery bills — even cheap measures can be effective, such as making bailouts conditional on emissions reductions. Researchers need to improve their understanding of why responses to this COVID-19 recession are different to others, to help make economies more resilient to future shocks.

Coal-fired energy generation is the backbone of India’s power sector and considered a driver of its economic development. However, it is associated with detrimental environmental and health impacts in India and its fleet is currently struggling with overcapacity and inefficiency problems. One solution to address these challenges is the early retirement of some of India’s coal-fired power plants. In this paper, we introduce multidimensional indices that identify plants for retirement based on comprehensive criteria that include technical and economic characteristics of plants as well as their environmental impacts. We implement an ensemble approach, where we formulate 8008 indices based on all possible combination of seven relevant parameters and rank plants accordingly. This approach facilitates a comprehensive analysis of the plants’ performance on different parameters and provides a new outlook on plant retirements that differs from the common approach of retiring plants based solely on technical characteristics such as age, capacity, and heat rate. Our results show that top plants recommended for early retirement are typically 7 years older, 13% more expensive and have around 40% higher population exposure to emissions compared to an average plant in India. We estimate the potential costs saved from the retirement of the worst-performing 50 GW of generating capacity to be $21 billion resulting from shifting ownership towards a cheaper cost of capital and replacing coal by more competitive sources such as solar power.

Southeast Asia is a significant stakeholder in the global action against climate change, given its growing population, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and vulnerability to climate change impacts. Public policy makers in this region are faced with the challenge of transitioning to cleaner energy sources to enable the attainment of Paris Agreement goals, while also expanding access to affordable and reliable energy supplies. Southeast Asia has one of world’s fastest growing rates of greenhouse gas emissions due to rising fossil fuel combustion, second only to South Asia. As such, it is imperative to decouple its energy consumption from emissions growth. This paper reviews Southeast Asia’s energy sector trends, with a focus on electricity supply and demand vis-à-vis global decarbonization efforts. Based on global and regional best practices, the paper highlights the crucial role that governments and public policy can play in accelerating the region’s clean energy transition, namely through the establishment of mandatory long-term climate and renewable energy targets and binding policies; use of iterative and adaptive power system planning; support for effective market development; financing of pioneering investments and trunk infrastructure; and support for a just and equitable transition.

This is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Sustainable Commodity Governance and the Global South.’ A broad range of transnational governance initiatives have emerged to respond to social and environmental challenges caused by commodity production. These initiatives – like voluntary sustainability standards and certifications – tend to target commodity producers in the Global South, but are overwhelmingly initiated and managed by organizations from the Global North. The agency and initiative of Southern actors in addressing sustainability challenges in their own backyards remains under-examined. In this introductory paper, we outline a typology of how commodity producers, civil society groups, and governments in the Global South have responded to the challenge of sustainable commodity production. Drawing inductively on the contributions to this special issue, we argue that Southern actors either participate in transnational governance, reinterpret it in their own context, or create their own initiatives entirely. The capacity of actors in the Global South to exert meaningful influence over sustainable commodity governance is relevant to ongoing debates in ecological economics about whether environmental and social goals can be achieved by working within global value chains or whether a wholesale reconfiguration of the global economy is required.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest public health crisis in recent history. Many states have taken unprecedented action in responding to the pandemic by restricting international and domestic travel, limiting economic activity, and passing massive social welfare bills. This begs the question, why have states taken extreme measures for COVID-19 but not the climate crisis? By comparing state responses to COVID-19 with those to the climate crisis, we identify the crisis characteristics that drive quick and far-reaching reactions to some global crises but not others. We inductively develop a conceptual framework that identifies eight crisis characteristics with observable variation between COVID-19 and climate change. This framework draws attention to under-considered areas of variance, such as the perceived differences in the universality of impacts, the legibility of policy responses, and the different sites of expertise for both crises. We use this structured comparison to identify areas of leverage for obtaining quicker and broader climate action.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of scholars and activists expressed confusion at the speed and scale of responses to COVID-19 in comparison to the global climate crisis (Bordoff 2020; Dolsak and Prakash 2020; Galbraith and Otto 2020). Granted, there was, and remains, significant variation in the nature of COVID-19 responses by governments (Hale et al. 2020). However, taken as a whole, the disparity between the two crises is enormous. COVID-19 resulted in national governments closing borders, shutting down workplaces, cancelling sports seasons, and confining citizens to their domiciles. Such actions are unthinkable for most governments as responses to the climate crisis. The question, then, is why have there been immediate and far-reaching state responses to COVID-19 but not similar responses to the climate crisis? After all, the climate crisis has been called a “direct existential threat” by the UN Secretary-General, whereas COVID-19 has an average global case fatality rate of just over 5 percent (Guterres 2018). Why the willingness to move mountains for one crisis but not the other?

We argue that COVID-19 and the climate crisis are different varieties of crisis and that the different characteristics of each crisis lead to different types of governance responses. This may initially appear to be an obvious argument. After all, the timescales of these crises differ dramatically and may auger toward different responses. However, we contend that there are other under-considered differences between these crises that account for their different responses. Enumerating these differences is useful for predicting governance responses to future crises and envisioning how perceptions of the climate crisis might be shifted to engender a faster and farther-reaching response. Our central contribution is a conceptual framework that outlines eight inductively derived crisis characteristics and explains how variation in the value of these characteristics may affect the scope and immediacy of state responses to crises. We argue that the higher the value of these eight characteristics, the more likely it is that a crisis will be met with swift and far-reaching responses. We begin by comparing COVID-19 and the climate crisis across these eight categories. We then describe the relationship between crisis characteristics and political responses. We end by discussing implications for the climate crisis.

Strategic issue framing is widely regarded as an effective communication strategy to alter public opinion and citizens’ policy support. However, it is unclear to what extent strategic framing can increase support for ambitious demand-side actions and policies that make the cost of mitigation perceptible in citizens’ everyday lives. Taking an exploratory approach, we conducted qualitative interviews and a comparative framing experiment with 9,750 survey respondents from China, Germany, and the United States. We analyzed strategic issue framing effects in two areas known to be key for increasing the sustainability of consumption: meat/fish consumption, and fossil-fuel car usage. Employing both classical linear regressions and advanced Bayesian sparse estimations, we show that in all three countries widespread arguments in favor of reduced meat/fish consumption and car use are unlikely to substantially alter citizens’ concern, willingness to pay, behavioral intentions and policy support for demand-side action. Our findings suggest that in the absence of a broader behavioral change campaign, strategic issue framing alone is unlikely to be effective in changing entrenched attitudes and behaviors. On its own, it is also unlikely to substantially increase public support for demand-side policies to reduce consumption. More careful research is needed to help policymakers understand the role and limits of different strategic framing techniques.

Mini-grids are growing in popularity as a viable solution to energy poverty in rural, hard to reach areas consisting of Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) markets. Social enterprises are starting to play a vital role in providing services to this neglected customer group but often face difficulties resulting from rural market imperfections. In this study, we aim to address the following research question: how and to what extent can a mini-grid based social enterprise resolve the technical and organisational challenges associated with providing services in a rural BoP environment? Using Husk Power Systems (HPS) as a case study, our interdisciplinary approach navigates the landscape between social entrepreneurship and socio-technical aspects of mini-grid operations in the rural BoP market. The case study is based on interview evidence with ten HPS employees, three founders and 22 user interviews. We make use of narrative analysis to analyse the interview material. The paper argues that continuous conflicts exist between social and commercial objectives concerning mini-grid operations in the rural BoP markets. As this case study reveals, social enterprises need to manage the socio-technical challenges inherent to mini-grid processes; otherwise, customer affordability and business viability become an unsolvable paradox.

Men continue to dominate the supply-side narratives of energy access projects, leaving an unexplored gap in gendered organizations. To fill this gap, the article utilises interviews with women workers to consider their lived experience working for an energy access-based organisation. Through the use of narrative analysis, this study highlights the importance of socio-cultural contextualisation of social entrepreneurial activities and social missions. It takes a persuasive case-study approach to analysing Husk Power Systems (HPS), which operates primarily in Bihar, India. HPS, a mini grid-based social enterprise, began its operations in Bihar in 2007 with the goal of ameliorating rural Bihar’s energy access problems and secondarily, empowering women through employment opportunities. Drawing on the concepts of women’s empowerment, social inequalities, and intersectionality, this article argues that although HPS provides formal employment opportunities, its presence has not secured long-lasting women’s empowerment in Bihar. As a social enterprise, HPS has limited capacity to reform social inequalities. Although HPS guarantees local job creation, we underscore further exploration of the intersectional dimensions influencing social enterprises’ energy access business operations’ longevity and impact, including those of local systems of power, caste, gender, and class.

Many oil and gas firms claim they are going green. But are they actually walking the talk? We analyze the political and economic behavior of publicly traded oil majors to understand the degree to which they are decarbonizing. We collect a wide range of firm-level data from 2004 to 2019, including a novel measurement of political behavior based on original coding of corporate earnings calls. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, firms’ political and economic behavior are not necessarily correlated, demonstrating the value of a two-pronged political economy approach to the study of multinational firms. Second, not a single firm is shifting away from fossil fuels during the time frame studied. Changes in business behavior have been relatively modest in scope. The most ambitious firms are engaging in hedging—mitigating risk through diversification rather than moving toward decarbonization. Third, major oil and gas firms meliorate anti-climate political positions between 2010 and 2018. Finally, firms with greater progress towards decarbonization tend to be located in or sell their products in jurisdictions with more stringent environmental regulation, have smaller refining sectors, and be involved in more industry coalitions.

Using unique household-level data from rural areas of six energy-access-deprived states in India, we examine the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for exclusive use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking. We find that awareness about LPG’s health benefits and diffusion of LPG within the community are the strongest determinants of WTP for exclusive use of LPG. Among demographic characteristics, only household size is correlated with WTP. Importantly, households exhibit significant price elasticity with regards to exclusive use of LPG. Households with irregular cash flows are less likely to pay for exclusive use of LPG. We find limited evidence supporting a negative association between availability of free biomass and the WTP for exclusive use of LPG. In contrast, higher household expenditure on purchased biomass is positively associated with WTP. Our estimates of mean WTP suggest that they are higher than the current effective monthly cost of subsidized LPG across households. However, they mask variation, and disaggregated estimates suggest that about 40–45 per cent of the households not using LPG as their primary fuel have a lower WTP than the current effective monthly cost of subsidized LPG and hence would need additional support to enable their cooking energy transition.

The Texas freeze of February 2021 left more than 4.5 million customers (more than 10 million people) without electricity at its peak, some for several days. The freeze had cascading effects on other services reliant upon electricity including drinking water treatment and medical services. Economic losses from lost output and damage are estimated to be $130 billion in Texas alone. In the wake of the freeze, there has been major fallout among regulators and utilities as actors sought to apportion blame and utilities and generators began to settle up accounts. This piece offers a retrospective on what caused the blackouts and the knock-on effects on other services, the subsequent financial and political effects of the freeze, and the implications for Texas and the country going forward. Texas failed to sufficiently winterize its electricity and gas systems after 2011. Feedback between failures in the two systems made the situation worse. Overall, the state faced outages of 30 GW of electricity as demand reached unprecedented highs. The gap between production and demand forced the non-profit grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), to cut off supply to millions of customers or face a systems collapse that by some accounts was minutes away. The 2021 freeze suggests a need to rethink the state’s regulatory approach to energy to avoid future such outcomes. Weatherization, demand response, and expanded interstate interconnections are potential solutions Texas should consider to avoid generation losses, reduce demand, and tap neighboring states’ capacity.

This study uses a spatial Durbin error model (SDEM) approach to analyze adoption trends for residential energy-efficiency measures (EEMs) in New York state. Model results are based on socioeconomic, building, and household demographic characteristics during the 2012–2016 period. Our study’s results confirm that a positive correlation exists between EEM uptake and multifamily buildings, gas-heated homes, education effects, and spatial spillover effects among neighboring ZIP codes. The results show that building attributes hold a relatively high explanatory power over EEM adoption compared with socioeconomic characteristics. Our results show that energy-efficiency policies can create positive and significant neighborly effects in promoting EEM adoption. The developed SDEM methodological framework provides useful insights in identifying energy-efficiency opportunities that exist in rural, suburban, and urban communities, highlighting the need to review policy incentives periodically to address underlying changes in the built environment and spatial disparities in energy-efficiency investments.

Whereas scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global collective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effective climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets’ value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the Liberal International Order (LIO); as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magnitudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.

Protected areas play an important role in biodiversity conservation, but they also carry local costs in the form of constraints on natural resource extraction. We investigate how policymakers make trade-offs between national environmental benefits and local economic costs by examining the designation of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Using a regression
discontinuity design, we find causal evidence that the Brazilian government systematically over-designates protected areas in municipalities controlled by opposition mayors relative to municipalities controlled by mayors in the president’s political coalition. In addition, we find evidence that this dynamic is likely driven by the economic interests of local elites in safe districts, and not by those of the municipal electorate. These results show that political considerations bias the geographic distribution of protected areas in the world’s largest rainforest.

Energy has been called the “golden thread” that connects economic growth, social equity and environmental sustainability, but important knowledge gaps exist on the impacts of low- and middle-income country energy interventions and transitions. This study offers perhaps the broadest characterization to date of the patterns and consistency in quantitative and peer-reviewed social science literature considering such impacts. Starting from approximately 80,000 papers identified using a search procedure organized along energy services, technology, and impact dimensions, and structured to achieve breadth and replicability, articles were first screened to yield a relevant subset of 3,000 quantitative papers. Relevance is defined as providing one or more types of impacts on intra-household, household, firm, public service, national economy, or environmental outcomes. A set of heat maps highlights areas of concentration in the literature, namely work that emphasizes the negative health and pollution effects of traditional cooking and fossil fuel use. The extent and consistency of evidence for different types of impacts (in terms of direction and statistical significance) is also discussed, which reveals considerable heterogeneity and highlights important knowledge gaps that remain despite rapidly expanding energy scholarship. The patterns of evidence are also surprisingly consistent across methods. The article concludes by articulating several research challenges that should motivate current and future generations of energy and development scholars.

Previous studies have modeled green technological change as innovations in the process of production (e.g., abatement technologies or energy sources). But greening the economy also requires changing products. The automotive industry, for example, needs to massively deploy alternative-fuel vehicles. Product manufacturing occurs within supply-chain networks, and developing new products typically requires complementary investments by suppliers. We study the incentives for green product innovation in industrial networks and how policies can affect them. We follow the industrial organization theory of product differentiation, and model green product innovations as upgrades in product quality where inputs from suppliers are essential for upgrading quality. We show that suppliers can be innovation bottlenecks and render policy instruments less effective. We provide an explicit mechanism for the role of institutions that help actors coordinate on the long-term direction of innovation. We discuss how our results help organize several findings from case studies in the automotive industry.

When do indigenous and other negatively affected populations mobilize against fossil fuel companies? We revisit social movement theory and environmental literature to identify three factors that may plausibly shape mobilization decisions of negatively affected populations—democratic institutions, community perceptions of government shaped by land tenure security, and firm attributes. Democratic institutions afford more opportunities for affected populations to air their grievances through protests than non-democratic ones. Land tenure security guaranteed by government contributes to the perception among affected populations that their objectives are better achieved through government mediation than protests. Characteristics of fossil fuel firms, such as state ownership, also shape activist perceptions of government credibility as a mediator. By analyzing fifty-seven countries over the period 1990 to 2013, we find that democracy and state ownership of fossil fuel firms are positively associated with protests, whereas land tenure security is negatively associated.

Approximately seven million population in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of China, a global climate sensitive region, still rely primarily on yak dung for household cooking and heating. The treatment and combustion of yak dung result in a variety of negative impacts in terms of local alpine grassland degradation, indoor air pollution, public health risk, as well as global climate change. There is an urgent need to explore alternative pathway for affordable and clean energy as indicated in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. This perspective has analyzed the key challenges rooted in yak dung use on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region. Based on this, this perspective has further proposed a new complementary energy system to take advantage of locally available, clean and sustainable energy sources of wind and solar power, and have provided economic analyses. Meanwhile, this perspective has pointed out the potential barriers to promoting the new complementary energy system in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region due to traditional habits, economic factors and policies. Finally, strategies for transitioning from yak dung to the proposed alternative energy system is discussed at the end. Successful energy transition for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region offers an important option to achieving many other sustainable development goals related to climate change, economic development, and environment. The perspective is expected to shed light on the development of sustainable energy in other developing region or countries in the world to address multiple societal goals.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cap-and-trade system targeting CO2 emissions from the electricity sector in the northeastern United States. As a major power producer and carbon emitter, Pennsylvania plans to join RGGI in 2022, which will affect both the carbon market (i.e., RGGI) and the regional electricity market (i.e., PJM). Combining a PJM power system model with a reduced-form model of CO2 emissions abatement from RGGI states that are not in PJM, we find the annual average emissions from power plants in Pennsylvania can be reduced by 40%, 79%, 68%, and 76% for CO2, SO2, NOx, and PM2.5, respectively, during 2022–2030. Then, based on a range of source-specific marginal damage estimates, we find the cumulative monetized health cobenefits to be 17.7 to 40.8 billion USD. However, the reduced emissions and health damages in Pennsylvania are slightly offset by increases in the other states in PJM that do not participate in RGGI. Our study hence highlights the potential cross-state leakage issue that warrants careful consideration in the policy design and implementation process.

Existing estimates of optimal climate policy ignore the possibility that carbon tax revenues could be used in a progressive way; model results therefore typically imply that near-term climate action comes at some cost to the poor. Using the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy (NICE) model, we show that an equal per capita refund of carbon tax revenues implies that achieving a 2 °C target can pay large and immediate dividends for improving well-being, reducing inequality and alleviating poverty. In an optimal policy calculation that weighs the benefits against the costs of mitigation, the recommended policy is characterized by aggressive near-term climate action followed by a slower climb towards full decarbonization; this pattern—which is driven by a carbon revenue Laffer curve—prevents runaway warming while also preserving tax revenues for redistribution. Accounting for these dynamics corrects a long-standing bias against strong immediate climate action in the optimal policy literature.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has the ‘co-benefit’ of also reducing air pollution and associated impacts on human health. Here, we incorporate health co-benefits into estimates of the optimal climate policy for three different climate policy regimes. The first fully internalizes the climate externality at the global level via a uniform carbon price (the ‘cooperative equilibrium’), thus minimizing total mitigation costs. The second connects to the concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ where nations coordinate their actions while accounting for different national capabilities considering socioeconomic conditions. The third assumes nations act only in their own self-interest. We find that air quality co-benefits motivate substantially reduced emissions under all three policy regimes, but that some form of global cooperation is required to prevent runaway temperature rise. However, co-benefits do warrant high levels of mitigation in certain regions even in the self-interested case, suggesting that air quality impacts may expand the range of possible policy outcomes whereby global temperatures do not increase unabated.

The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a framework for national and international efforts to further economic development, end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure peace and prosperity for all people by 2030. In the first four years since the SDGs came into force (2016–2019), little to no progress has been made on 107 of the 169 SDG targets, and the world is even moving away from 39 of the targets. (1) In 2020, COVID-19 has created additional setbacks for SDGs. With the year 2030 less than a decade away, an urgent and more ambitious response is crucial to enable SDGs to be realized globally. We need strong leadership to create secure and cooperative partnerships between governments, the private sector, and civil societies around the globe to move these goals forward at pace. As leading economic powers, the U.S. and China are well positioned to take a leadership role in this action. By building closer collaborations at both governmental and nongovernmental levels and sustained collaborations on science and technology, the U.S. and China can act together to help achieve the SDGs by utilizing complementary expertise and resources. Moreover, the two countries can champion sustainable development through their global reach in trade, investment, aid, technology diffusion, and programs of talent exchange.

Exposure to air pollution, a leading contributor to the global burden of disease, can cause economic losses. Driven by clean air policies, the air quality in China, one of the most polluted countries, has improved rapidly since 2013. This has enabled a unique, quasi-experiment to assess the economic impact of air pollution empirically. Using a series of nation-scale longitudinal surveys in 2011, 2013, and 2015, we first examined the questionnaire-based medical expenditure changes before and after the policy intervention for air pollution. Using a state-of-the-art estimator of the historical concentration of particulate matters with diameter less than 2.5 μm (particulate matter (PM)2.5), we further quantified the association between household medical expenditure and PM2.5 using mixed-effect models of the repeated measurements from 26,511 households in 126 cities. Regression models suggest a robust linear association between reduced PM2.5 and saved medical expenditures, since the association did not vary significantly across models with different covariate adjustments, subregions, or subpopulations. Each 10 μg/m3 reduction in PM2.5 was associated with a saving of 251.6 (95% CI: 30.8, 472.3; p-value = 0.026) Yuan in per capita annual medical expenditure. However, due to limitations in data quality (e.g., self-reported expenditures), and imperfect control for unmeasured confounders or impact from concurrent healthcare reform in China, the causality underlying our findings should be further confirmed or refuted. In this study, we observed that compared with the PM2.5 reduction in 2013, the PM2.5 reduction in 2017 was associated with a saving of 552 (95% CI: 68, 1036) Yuan / (person × year), or approximately 736 billion Yuan (equivalent to 111 billion US dollar) per year nationally, which is equivalent to approximately 1% of the national gross domestic product of China.

From solar lanterns to home systems and minigrids, distributed renewable energy (DRE) has become increasingly competitive as an alternative to grid extension in household electrification across many parts of the emerging world. We explore how DRE use in Indian households has evolved against the backdrop of massive public investment in grid extension. Using two rounds of the 2015–2018 ACCESS household data from six Indian states, we estimate the impact of household electrification via grid extension on DRE ownership and use. We find that demand for solar microgrids and minigrids has all but disappeared, whereas demand for solar home systems and lanterns as backup solutions to intermittent grid electricity supply continues to grow. Most notably, while grid electrification has increased from 66% to 85%, solar lantern ownership has grown from 1.2% to 5%. The use of DRE as a backup solution to government electrification schemes seems driven by changes in quality of electricity supply. These analyses confirm that intermittent grid electricity supply is key to understanding the solar lantern’s continued popularity. The results show that where population density, household income, and government commitment all favor grid extension, the most affordable DRE technologies can still play an important role. These lessons offer insights into the development of solar-based lighting markets in other regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where grid extension continues but grid electricity remains intermittent in supply.

The reported effects of electrification on rural entrepreneurship are mixed, with recent studies describing heterogeneity in outcomes and methodological challenges in attributing causal effects. Furthermore, the debate largely focuses on performance outcomes, rather than supply- and demand-side barriers to productive electricity use itself. In this paper, we contribute new evidence describing electricity use among micro- and small-enterprises (MSEs) in rural northern India. Puzzlingly, 34% of the 2,004 MSEs surveyed have no grid-connection despite almost complete village grid electrification. We exploit variation in grid supply hours at village level, finding no conclusive link with this and MSE connection likelihoods. Rather, connection likelihood appears to be more closely related to wealth characteristics. Supporting this hypothesis, the reported electricity consumption appears equally unrelated to supply quality and quite low overall: 75% of grid-connected MSEs consume less than 1 kW-hour per day, powering only lighting and fans. These results are notable given the positive bias we expect due to the likely endogeneity between grid supply quality and broader development trends, as noted in recent literature. Our work follows others in arguing that supply side improvements must occur in concert with demand side initiatives to unlock rural MSE electricity consumption. At the same time, the role of off-grid technologies in meeting nascent MSE electricity needs deserves further study.

As household electrification rates continue to increase globally, the focus in energy access planning is increasingly shifting towards quality of service. To inform this planning, we explore changes in household electricity and people’s use and satisfaction with their service over time in rural India. Fielded in 2015, the ACCESS survey collected data on energy access from more than 8,500 households living across six Indian states. In 2018, the same households were re-surveyed. Using this longitudinal dataset, we sketch the changes in electricity access that took place during these three years. We find that access and the quality of supply have both improved substantially, with a 17 percentage points increase in electrification rates (95% CI: [15,19]). However, a large minority (about one fifth) remains unsatisfied with its electricity access. People’s satisfaction levels were more sensitive to the quality of supply in 2018 compared to 2015. We propose that this change is a result of evolving expectations of electricity services that are offered. As households climb electricity access tiers and acquire more and larger electric appliances (such as fans or TVs), their demands increasingly shift from focusing on the extensive margin of supply to its intensive margin.

Social science research has often portrayed green industrial policy as a hard test for state capacity. Defined here as state initiatives that allocate public resources to accelerate economic growth through low carbon, structural change in the economy, green industrial policies often mobilize external opposition from incumbent groups whose financial interests are threatened by decarbonization. This article examines potential interest group opposition to green industrial policies through the lens of state investment in the Chinese coal power sector—a key obstacle to China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal. Using a novel dataset on financial investments in 2675 Chinese coal power plants, the article shows that different levels of government have remarkably similar potential for exposure to stranded assets as a result of green industrial policy. Not only do state actors have controlling stakes in the majority of nominally private coal plants in China, but the majority of such plants have investments from agencies at multiple levels of governments. Our findings suggest that green industrial policies could therefore also face resistance from economic coalitions within the state: both state-owned coal plants and government agencies with substantial investments in such enterprises could object to policies that harm their financial interests. Theoretically, this implies the need for a conceptualization of state capacity that includes the ability to overcome internal opposition to green industrial policy. Empirically, our study highlights a predicament for the Chinese state in climate policy: it has set ambitious goals to decarbonize, but also has a vested interest in ensuring the profitability of the world’s largest coal-fired power generation fleet.

The United States is historically one of the world’s largest investors in renewable energy research and development (R&D). Yet, it has struggled to build a large manufacturing industry for the technologies needed in a clean energy transition. U.S. universities and startups have excelled at inventing new technologies, but much of the global production capacity in these sectors is located elsewhere. A key reason for the lack of domestic clean tech manufacturing has been the scarcity of capital among clean technology firms. Clean energy startups have struggled to raise sufficient funds to invest in domestic manufacturing capacity. This research brief explains why political leaders regularly promise domestic manufacturing jobs in clean energy industries, lays out the reasons why such promises have rarely been met in the past, and assesses the IFCUS as a way to deliver on such promises. Establishing an organization akin to a state-owned development bank for manufacturing is essential if the United States wants to increase the share of clean energy technologies manufactured domestically. Doing so would help increase the number of jobs in clean energy industries, bolster middle-class employment, help build a broad political coalition in favor of action on climate change, and reduce dependence on China in clean energy supply chains at a time when the U.S.-China relationship has come under significant stress.

Using a multi-sector model of human and natural systems, we find that the nationwide cost from state-varying climate policy in the United States is only one-tenth higher than that of nationally uniform policy. The benefits of state-led action — leadership, experimentation and the practical reality that states implement policy more reliably than the federal government — do not necessarily come with a high economic cost.

While the past decade of transitions scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the centrality of politics, key questions on transition politics deserve further research. Here, we develop a heuristic framework from the discipline of political science that separates transition politics into the classic categories of interests, ideas, institutions, as well as elite and mass politics. Based on this framework, we conduct a review of existing transitions literature on politics. We find that some areas of our framework are better covered than others. For instance, while the institutional foundations of elite politics are relatively well researched, there are only few studies on interests and ideas in mass politics. In geographical and sectoral terms, research is biased toward energy transitions in Europe and North America. Based on our review, we map areas for future research we believe to be indispensable to better understand varieties of transition politics.

Traditionally, analysis of the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions has assumed that governments would implement idealized, optimal policies such as uniform economy-wide carbon taxes. Yet actual policies in the real world, especially in large federal governments, are often highly heterogeneous and vary in political support and administrative capabilities within a country. While the benefits of heterogeneous action have been discussed widely for experimentation and leadership, little is known about its costs. Focusing on the United States, we represent plausible variation (by more than a factor of 3) in the stringency of state-led climate policy in a process-based integrated assessment model (GCAM-USA). For a wide array of national decarbonization targets, we find that the nationwide cost from heterogeneous subnational policies is only one-tenth higher than nationally uniform policies. Such results hinge on two critical technologies (advanced biofuels and electricity) for which inter-state trade ameliorates the economic efficiencies that might arise with heterogeneous action.

Political-feasibility concerns are at the center of real-world air-pollution policymaking. Yet, these concerns are often not represented in leading decision-support tools that have been used for assessing policies’ environmental impacts. Focusing on a wide range of clean-air policies in India, we assess their political-feasibility scores on the basis of public opinion, market, and institutional considerations and then incorporate these scores into the evaluation of environmental impacts by using an integrated assessment model (GAINS-South Asia). We demonstrate that although some policies with substantial potential to mitigate air pollution are also highly politically feasible (e.g., replacing solid fuels with cleaner fuels in households), others can be less politically feasible (e.g., banning agricultural waste burning). Because some clean-air policies co-reduce CO2 emissions and aerosols, considering varying degrees of political feasibility is particularly important in achieving air-pollution and climate objectives simultaneously because of its implications on the implementation scale and policy sequence.

When can states implement policies against the opposition from powerful interest groups? Research on state capacity has examined bureaucratic sources of capacity, leaving unexplained why countries with similar levels of bureaucratic capacity vary in goal attainment. We introduce the notion of strategic state capacity to explain this puzzle. It refers to the ability of the state to mobilize or demobilize interest groups in pursuit of policy goals. We identify four general types of strategies states use to counter opposition: recruiting allies, aligning interests, limiting access, and quieting interests. We examine these in cases on climate and clean energy policymaking in California, France, Germany, and the United States. Climate politics is an increasingly important field of distributive politics with powerful opposition from interest groups. The concept of strategic state capacity complements bureaucratic notions of capacity to show how the state actively organizes its relations with interest groups to advance policy goals.

Despite substantial investments in high-frequency, remote-sensed forest monitoring in the Amazon, early deforestation alerts generated by these systems rarely reach the most directly affected populations in time to deter deforestation. We study a community monitoring program that facilitated transfer of early deforestation alerts from the Global Forest Watch network to indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and trained and incentivized community members to patrol forests in response to those alerts. The program was randomly assigned to 39 of 76 communities. The results from our analysis suggest that the program reduced tree cover loss, but the estimated effects from the experiment are imprecise: We estimate a reduction of 8.4 ha per community in the first year (95% CI [−19.4, 2.6]) and 3.3 ha in the second year (95% CI: [−13.6, 7.0]) of monitoring. The estimated reductions were largest in communities facing the largest threats. Data from monitoring records and community surveys provide evidence about how the program may affect forest outcomes. Community members perceived that the program’s monitors were new authorities with influence over forest management and that the monitors’ incentivized patrols were substitutes for traditional, unincentivized citizen patrols that suffer from free riding and inhibit timely community detection of and responses to deforestation. Should our findings be replicated elsewhere, they imply that externally facilitated community-based monitoring protocols that combine remote-sensed early deforestation alerts with training and incentives for monitors could contribute to sustainable forest management.

Pervasive overuse and degradation of common pool resources (CPRs) is a global concern. To sustainably manage CPRs, effective governance institutions are essential. A large literature has developed to describe the institutional design features employed by communities that successfully manage their CPRs. Yet, these designs remain far from universally adopted. We focus on one prominent institutional design feature, community monitoring, and ask whether nongovernmental organizations or governments can facilitate its adoption and whether adoption of monitoring affects CPR use. To answer these questions, we implemented randomized controlled trials in six countries. The harmonized trials randomly assigned the introduction of community monitoring to 400 communities, with data collection in an additional 347 control communities. Most of the 400 communities adopted regular monitoring practices over the course of a year. In a meta-analysis of the experimental results from the six sites, we find that the community monitoring reduced CPR use and increased user satisfaction and knowledge by modest amounts. Our findings demonstrate that community monitoring can improve CPR management in disparate contexts, even when monitoring is externally initiated rather than homegrown. These findings provide guidance for the design of future programs and policies intended to develop monitoring capabilities in communities. Furthermore, our harmonized, multisite trial provides sustainability science with a new way to study the complexity of socioecological systems and builds generalizable insights about how to improve CPR management.

The clean energy transition has long been framed in terms of its technological and economic feasibility. An increasingly salient constraint lies in its political feasibility. The transition requires vigorous public support to be completed. Yet increased consumer costs associated with the deployment of renewable electricity could make voters – and, by extension, governments – less supportive of it. As a result, overly aggressive government support for renewables could lead to its own downfall. To examine this threat, I document two stylized facts. First, the expansion of renewable electricity capacity has been followed by an increase in household electricity bills, and this has mostly happened because of energy-specific taxes. An increase of renewable electricity capacity by one within-country standard deviation raises a typical household’s bill by EUR 5.7 per MWh (95% CI: [3, 8.3]), most of which comes from an increase in non-VAT taxes (+EUR 3.8/MWh [2.6; 5.1]). Second, these taxes have hurt popular support for aggressive renewable energy policy. An increase of non-VAT taxes by one standard deviation increases the share of people who find renewable energy too ambitious by 0.7 percentage points (95% CI: [0.1; 1.3]). Climbing costs could therefore undermine further political support toward renewable electricity deployment and threaten its contribution to greenhouse gas reductions.

Despite multiple approaches over the last several decades to harmonize conservation and development goals in the tropics, forest-dependent households remain the poorest in the world. Durable housing and alternatives to fuelwood for cooking are critical needs to reduce multi-dimensional poverty. These improvements also potentially reduce pressure on forests and alleviate forest degradation. We test this possibility in dry tropical forests of the Central Indian Highlands where tribal and other marginalized populations rely on forests for energy, construction materials, and other livelihood needs. Based on a remotely-sensed measure of forest degradation and a 5000 household survey of forest use, we use machine learning (causal forests) and other statistical methods to quantify treatment effects of two improved living standards – alternatives to fuelwood for cooking and non-forest based housing material – on forest degradation in 1, 2, and 5 km buffers around 500 villages. Both improved living standards had significant treatment effects (-0.030±0.078, -0.030±0.023, 95% CI) respectively, with negative values indicating less forest degradation, within 1 km buffers around villages. Treatment effects were lower with increasing distance from villages. Results suggest that improved living standards can both reduce forest degradation and alleviate poverty. Forest restoration efforts can target improved living standards for local communities without conflicts over land tenure or taking land out of production to plant trees.

Extreme climatic events and variability are on the rise around the world, with varying implications for populations across socio-economic conditions. Effective strategies for climate adaptation and development depend on understanding these differential sensitivities to climatic variability. This study focuses on a vulnerable population living in forest-fringe villages of central India, where seasonal migration is a common livelihood strategy for poor households to supplement their incomes with remittances. We quantify the relative sensitivity of a decision to migrate for the first time to climate and socio-economic variables and how the sensitivities vary for different segments of the population. We surveyed 5000 households in 500 forest-fringe villages to identify patterns of migration from 2013 to 2017. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression model, we predicted the probability of first-time migration of a household member based on climate variables and household- and district-level characteristics. We find that households in more agricultural and prosperous districts experience lower rates of migration but are more sensitive to climatic variability than households in poorer districts. The probability of first-time migration from a household in the most prosperous district increases by approximately 40% with one standard deviation in mean maximum temperature or rainfall from the 1981–2017 mean. However, the probability of migration does not vary as a function of climatic variability for households in the poorest district. We attribute this difference in sensitivities to the greater dependence on agriculture and irrigation in more prosperous districts and poverty-driven dependence on migration regardless of the climate in poorer districts. Households investing remittances from migration in agricultural intensification could become increasingly sensitive to climate variability, particularly with water shortages and projected increases in climate variability in the region. Promotion of non-agricultural livelihood options and climate-resilient agriculture could the reduce sensitivity of migration to climate variability in the study region.

Political support for decarbonizing the global economy is at an all-time high. The good news is that about two-thirds of carbon emissions come from countries that have committed to reach ‘net zero’ by mid-century — they aim to cut their greenhouse-gas outputs and capture as much as they emit1. The bad news? The computer models that analysts use to assess routes to achieve such goals are missing a crucial factor: politics.

These ‘integrated assessment models’ (IAMs) combine insights from climate science and economics to estimate how industrial and agricultural processes might be transformed to tackle global warming. They’re encoded with knowledge about technologies, such as pollution-free power plants and the cost of electric vehicles. Thus IAMs enable researchers to probe, for example, how a carbon tax might induce big cuts in emissions2, or how a drive to decarbonize the transport sector could shift investments towards greener fuels and electricity.

Amidst a general increase in household electricity access across the world, some vulnerable communities stand at risk of being left behind. As a result, electricity inequality can be increasing even in countries in which access improves on average. We explore this question in the context of Jharkhand, India, which is characterized by its large tribal populations. Us-ing new household survey data, we document two findings. First, tribal households are much more likely to suffer from poor electricity access. Electrification rates are about 11 percentage points lower than the general population (adjusting for a range of confounding factors) (95%CI: [-21, -1]). Likewise, tribal households own fewer appliances than their general population counterpart: the capacity of their appliances is 168W smaller [-42, -295] than that of the general population. Second, aggressive public policy can reduce electricity inequality. We show that tribal households were much more likely to be targeted by Saubhagya, a government electrification scheme, than the rest of the population, with estimates ranging from 11 (95% CI: [-2;23]) to 22 percent (95% CI: [12; 32]). Public policy could thus, under favorable conditions and when designed appropriately, be an effective tool to combat energy inequality.

Many developing countries are ambitiously investing in intermittent renewable electricity but face problems of integration. Advocates of the standard model of power sector reform argue that this is at least partly due to incomplete implementation of reform measures, such as unbundling, absence of incentives for economic dispatch through appropriate market signals, and exposing consumers to market signals. However, examples of complete implementation of these elements of the standard model exist mainly in the developed world. And some authors argue that the model prevalent in developing countries should be recognized in their own right, calling the model a ‘hybrid power market’.

This article examines both the premise and prescription of the argument to integrate renewable electricity in developing countries through elements of the standard model (such as a wholesale spot market, or an independent system operator for dispatch). This is done by highlighting the differences between power sector reform experiences in the developing and developed worlds, and the causal mechanisms underlying these differences. The causal mechanisms are viewed through two disciplinary lenses – neo-classical economics and political economy. Two brief case studies of India and China are presented to elucidate the challenges they face in implementing reform measures to integrate renewables. Based on the causal mechanisms and contextual conditions identified, considerations are proposed for designing institutions to integrate renewables in developing countries.

The findings suggest that cost-recovery issues and distributional imperatives need to be addressed in order to implement markets or other institutions that can enable greater integration of renewables. The article presents four ‘design considerations’, framed in terms of desired futures and possible constraints, which relate cost-recovery and distributional considerations to the implementation of unbundling, economic dispatch, or wholesale price signals.

State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.

This study aims to reveal the status quo and future trend of thermoelectric water use and water stress in India. We compiled a bottom-up geo-database for all thermal power plants in India and identified the type of cooling technology used. We then estimated thermoelectric water withdrawal and water consumption in India from 2009 to 2018 and projected future trends in thermoelectric water use up to 2027 using the integrated power planning and dispatch model, SWITCH-India. Results show that thermoelectric power generation in India is not a major source of water stress in most basins until 2027. Freshwater withdrawal varied from 14 to 16 billion m3 during the study period, while freshwater consumption increased with growing thermal power generation. The catchment in the middle of the Ganga River basin has the largest freshwater withdrawal and consumption. The volume of water withdrawal accounts for less than 1% of blue water availability in most catchments. It is also likely that a larger proportion of power generation and water withdrawal will occur in catchments that are under lower water stress in the future. Policy interventions should target stressed catchment areas and improve the resilience of thermal power plants to outages due to water stress.

Off-grid electric systems powered by renewable sources are appealing because they could reduce energy poverty in a sustainable manner. Yet their deployment has been uneven. In this article, I argue that the deployment of such technology pre-requires effective institutions. This is because the off-grid power industry faces two problems: governments (who may reverse policies on short notice) and customers (who may fail to pay their bills). More democratic regimes, which tend to uphold the rule of law, can mitigate these risks and facilitate long-term investments. Empirically, I show that countries that are democratic deployed considerably more off-grid renewable energy capacity. An increase in the democratic score by one standard deviation leads to an increase in deployed capacity by 40% (95% CI: [20%, 63%]). Further, I show that this effect operates through supply-side institutions, such as the protection of the rule of law. I find little evidence for a competing interpretation of my main results based on the demand side: democracies do not provide more off-grid power in countries with stronger demand for it. These results suggest that institutions are a prerequisite for a successful growth of the off-grid renewable energy industry and raise concerns over the ability of its technologies to penetrate the most destitute regions.

Does political alignment at different levels of government influence centralized bureaucratic processes? Environmental clearances are important regulatory tools that allow governments to target the distribution of public goods/bads by both controlling negative externalities and allocating rents from project developers. While commentators advocate for central authorities to control environmental licensing of major projects, in emerging markets with weak formal institutions it is still possible for local politicians to influence this process. We use data on environmental clearances in India for thermal (primarily coal-fired) power plants between the years 2004-2014 to test whether local legislators influence an otherwise bureaucratic process in which they play no formal role. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that partisan alignment with the state chief minister results in a sharp increase in local clearance applications. This is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of political influence “greases the wheels” of bureaucracy by facilitating more environmental approvals, rather than creating regulatory bottlenecks. Our results contribute to a growing literature that suggests that lower-level politicians can still exert influence on the policy process despite having few institutionalized powers.

In many developing countries, theft remains a significant obstacle to ensuring proper public service provision and access. We argue that social acceptability of theft constitutes an understudied barrier to curbing power theft. Using a conjoint experiment, we study perceptions of theft in the form of using illegal wires, katiya, among rural and urban households in Uttar Pradesh, India (n = 1800). Social acceptability of theft is influenced by the income and electricity supply quality contexts of offenders. For a 1000-rupee (approx. 15 USD) income difference between hypothetical vignette agents, the odds of choosing a higher acceptability rating for an offender increases by 11%. One fewer hour of electricity supply received by the vignette person would increase the acceptability of their theft activity by 4%. The majority of respondents chose a warning as the appropriate punishment severity; income and supply quality distinguishes the odds of choosing higher punishment categories. While there exists a sense of social reprimand for stealing power, desired punishment is nuanced and context-dependent.

Indian internal migration is among the highest in the world, with 30% of the population migrating, often for work. Such population movement can alleviate poverty and reduce forest degradation. However, estimates of this double dividend are scarce. We estimate the potential of internal migration to alleviate poverty by exploring migrant characteristics and their investments. We then evaluate whether there are short-term benefits for Central Indian forests by assessing the relationship between migration and changes in forest use over a 5-year timespan. Finally, we study the village-level association between forest degradation and the proportion of migrating households in the village. We show that internal migration has the potential to alleviate poverty. On the other hand, migration does not reduce forest degradation in such a short term.

Rural energy access in India has improved steadily over the last decade. This progress is attributed to national energy reforms that aim to not only expand access to grid electricity and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) but also to improve quality of access. Considering the historical caste-based energy access disparities unique to the Indian context, how equitable have recent improvements been? Using panel data representative of rural areas in six of India’s poorest states, we apply a linear regression model with caste and year interactions to quantify changes in energy access for historically marginalized Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) households relative to the all others between 2015-2018. We find that overall, inequities in an SC/ST household’s likelihood to obtain an LPG connection reduced (by 4.6%-points [95% CI: 0.7 to 7.7]). In contrast, overall inequities in grid connection likelihoods remained consistent. Looking beyond binary connection rates, we find that an SC/ST household’s supply improved less in terms of daily supply hours (by 1.42 hours [CI: 1 to 1.83]) and monthly outage days (by 1 day [CI: 0.7 to 1.3]). Disaggregate analyses indicate that these broader trends are composed of distinct state-level trends modified by differences in baselines, marginalised population distributions, institutional capacity and accountability. Energy policy reform in India must consider caste-based inequities and take advantage of multi-dimensional supply measurement to encourage equitable and just progress towards sustainable energy access for all sections of the population.

Even as India pursues universal electricity access, household electricity demand remains poorly understood. While studies have investigated residential electricity consumption, most focus on urban consumers, even though a majority of the newly electrified households are in rural areas.

Using primary data on 10,000 households, we investigate rural electricity demand in 200 villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, and Rajasthan. We rely on energy use surveys that capture appliance use and multiple energy sources. We find that the surveyed households typically consume 39.3 kWh per month during the summer months, which is half of the country’s average residential consumption. We also find that hours of grid-electricity supply predicts demand: every 1% increase in supply hours is associated with 1.245% increase in demand. Our findings suggest that improved supply can lead to significant welfare gains for consumers, and allow discoms to tap into the unmet electricity demand in rural areas.

Concerns about climate change have provoked global backlash against coal-fired power generation, which remains the backbone of major power systems in China, India, and elsewhere. Air pollution has galvanized opposition to coal-fired power generation, but counting on concerns over air pollution to promote the coal-to-renewables shift in the long run is a risky bet. As the Chinese experience shows, the best available technologies now enable coal-fired power plants to stop producing air pollution. By investing in an ultra-low emission (ULE) coal fleet, emerging countries can solve the air pollution problem in an affordable manner.

Recognizing this reality, we call for an updated view regarding the role of coal power in emerging countries and in the global effort to avoid climate disruption. The prospect of a ULE coal fleet is a major short-term opportunity for emerging countries around the world. With the best available technology, virtually removing air pollution from coal-fired power generation brings substantial health benefits.

Why do power sector reform succeed and fail in democratic contexts? We conduct comparative case studies of these reforms in the largest 20 Indian states. These states have responded to India’s electricity generation, transmission, and distribution crises in different ways. Similar to conventional case studies, our research design has the virtue of allowing us to explore historical processes. However, having a large number of cases also enables us to consider multiple causal factors at the same time. Both the findings and non-findings speak to the broad debate on the possible causes of reform failure. We find support for hypotheses emphasizing electoral opportunism and the politics of interest group (organized labor, agricultural interests). In contrast, partisan cleavages do not seem to explain reform failure. These findings offer new insights into politically feasible reform strategies for India.

As the world’s largest coal producer and consumer, China’s transition from coal to cleaner energy sources is critical for achieving global decarbonization. Increasing regulations on air pollution and carbon emissions and decreasing costs of renewables drive China’s transition away from coal; however, this transition also has implications for employment and social justice. Here, we assess China’s current coal-transition policies, their barriers, and the potential for an accelerated transition, as well as the associated environmental, human health, and employment and social justice issues that may arise from the transition. We estimate that the most aggressive coal-transition pathway could reduce annual premature death related to coal combustion by 224,000 and reduce annual water consumption by 4.3 billion m3 in 2050 compared with business-as-usual. We highlight knowledge gaps and conclude with policy recommendations for an integrated approach to facilitate a rapid and just transition away from coal in China.

Solid fuel combustion is a major cause of household air pollution, a leading environmental health risk factor globally. In India, over 750 million people continue to rely on firewood and other solid fuels for daily cooking. We explore the drivers of adoption and use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), India’s dominant clean cooking fuel. We document strides in LPG ownership using a panel dataset of over 8,500 rural households from six Indian states surveyed in 2015 and 2018 (ACCESS), partially due to India’s flagship clean cooking policy Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY). We further demonstrate that the drivers of initial LPG adoption also apply to use. While fuel stacking – using solid fuels and LPG jointly – is pervasive, improved rural incomes and education result in the increased use of clean cooking fuels. After adoption, general LPG customers are predicted to consume on average 91 kilograms of LPG yearly (95% confidence interval (CI): 89-93 kg/year). However, PMUY beneficiaries are predicted to consume 27 kilograms of LPG (95% CI: 24-30 kg/year) less on average than general customers each year, even after controlling for socio-economic differences and years of using LPG. Our findings suggest that additional strategies to accelerate the transition to exclusive LPG use among the 80 million households acquiring LPG through PMUY should aim to improve affordability and increase awareness to realize the full benefits of the Government of India’s investments in cleaner cooking.

Household electrification aims to provide populations with access to a wide range of energy services for social and economic development, ranging from lighting to electric cooking. Electrification policy has historically focussed on grid connections, however, rather than household capabilities to satisfy energy service needs. We explore a representative panel dataset of households from rural areas of six states across northern India in order to link distinct dimensions of electricity supply with electrical energy service utilisation. Using a regression framework, we show that household electrification policy in India must look beyond connections and consider disaggregate dimensions of supply, paying special attention to supply availability measured in hours per day. Following electrification, households surveyed were highly likely to utilise lighting and ICTs regardless of supply, while an improvement of 12 hours to supply was associated with higher likelihoods of space cooling (12.3%-points [CI: 10.7 to 13.9]) and entertainment (13.4%-points [11.2 to 15.6]) services utilisation. In contrast, mechanical loads, thermal loads, refrigeration and electric cooking remain constrained by low income levels and other factors. Disaggregate supply analysis supports the shift towards electrification policy that unlocks desired capabilities while using all available technologies, both grid and off-grid, to achieve more just outcomes for all.

Ambient air pollution kills over four million people every year globally. Improving air quality presents a complex problem for governments as emissions are produced from a wide range of sources and tend to cross boundaries. To understand the challenge of transboundary air pollution transfer, we use a detailed emissions inventory and a source-oriented chemical transport model to explore state-to-state flows of emissions within the world’s largest democracy, India, where poor air quality has caused a public health crisis. On average, 46% of population-weighted air pollution exposure originates from another state. Of the major sources, energy (75%) and industry (53%) see most of their emissions travel to another state. All sectors have 39% or more of their emissions travel across state boundaries. India’s current policy framework is not equipped to deal with these problems, as it does not centralize the formulation and enforcement of relevant policies sufficiently. To solve the problem of air pollution, India needs a more centralized form of environmental federalism.

While scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global collective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, like coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effective climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of the value of their assets over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the LIO: as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magnitudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.

Governments in developing countries are investing billions of dollars to increase electricity access in rural areas, but the literature on the impact of these investments has produced mixed results. We leverage a unique characteristic of household electrification policy in Uttar Pradesh, India, whereby only households within 40 meters of an electricity pole are eligible for a legal electrical connection, to estimate the causal impact of electrification using a pre-registered instrumental variable design. With an original survey of 686 households across 120 habitations in the Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh, we find that legal electrification has a positive impact on household expenditures, adult household activities, and ownership and usage of appliances. The results suggest a more optimistic picture about the impact of rural electrification than some previous studies.

Electricity access and appliance usage are integral parts of developing a modern economy in rural areas. Unfortunately, many households in rural India struggle to access reliable electricity and, therefore, are unable to power appliances throughout the day. We use household survey data from 10,249 households across the Indian states of Bihar, Odisha, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh to explore potential drivers of electric appliance usage. By applying a series of linear and nonlinear models, we find that grid-connected households have more electricity available to them, and use significantly more electricity to power appliances in each of four designated household appliance categories: lighting (e.g., LEDs and CFLs), cooling (e.g., fans and AC units), entertainment (e.g., phones and TVs), and housekeeping (e.g., refrigerators and irons). Households using alternative power sources, including solar home systems (SHSs) and mini-grids, exhibit high uptake and use of lower-level appliances in the lighting and cooling categories, but much less so in the entertainment and housekeeping categories. Grid access is also correlated with higher electricity availability than alternative sources. Electricity availability is shown to be a highly significant predictor for powering appliances for longer time periods in all categories, but especially for more easily attainable appliances in lighting and cooling categories.

We develop a theory to explain the persistence of tensions between decentralized delegation and centralized control of environmental governance in authoritarian regimes. Economic benefits from decentralization – information, competition, and efficiency – conflict with environmental goals of centralized policy harmonization and management of inter-jurisdictional externalities. Decentralization to local government actors can facilitate economic growth but also empower them in ways that undermine environmental governance. Persistent tensions between decentralized and centralized imperatives generate cycles in environmental and energy systems governance. We test our theory of authoritarian environmental governance cycles using the case of China’s power sector, drawing on evidence from primary source documents, field interviews, and multiple data sources on the development and distribution of energy generating capacity. We focus on two policy areas – coal-fired power and wind energy – that are integral to central government efforts to improve the quality of environmental governance. This research explains the puzzling alternations in the locus of governance, and contributes to understanding inter-governmental relations and environmental politics in authoritarian regimes.

Air pollution is a vexing problem for emerging countries that strike a delicate balance between environmental protection, health, and energy for growth. We examine these difficulties in a study of disparate levels of exposure to pollution from coal-fired power generation in India, a country with high levels of air pollution and large, marginalized populations. With data on coal plant locations, atmospheric conditions, and census demographics, we estimate exposure to coal plant emissions using models that predict emission transportation. We find that ethnic and poor populations are more likely to be exposed to coal pollution. However, this relationship is sometimes non-linear and follows an inverted u-shape similar to that of an Environmental Kuznets Curve. We theorize that this non-linear relationship is due to the exclusion of marginalized communities from both the negative and positive externalities of industrial development.

Electricity is the most commonly used form of energy for artificial lighting in modern society. Despite a rapid growth in the rate of electrification, 9% of electrified Indian households in our six sampled states continued to use kerosene as their primary lighting fuel in 2018. This appears as a puzzle considering the benefits of electric lights. Using a panel survey of rural households in six states in India, we examine why some grid-connected households primarily used kerosene lamps for illumination. We use a logistic regression model to test our hypothesis regarding the relationship between primary lighting choices and electricity quality. The results show that household primary lighting choices are correlated with nighttime duration of electricity service, daytime duration of electricity service, and the number of days without any electricity connection, at the 99% confidence level. Among these three factors, nighttime duration of electricity service has the greatest impact. To further promote the use of electric lights, intensive schemes to improve electricity quality are needed.

From carbon pricing to green industrial policy, economic ideas have shaped climate policy. Drawing on a new dataset of pol-icy reports, we show how economic ideas influenced climate policy advice by major international organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank, from 1990 to 2017. In the 1990s, the neoclassi-cal notion of weak complementarity between environmental protection and growth dominated debates on sustainable devel-opment. In the mid-2000s, economic thought on the environment diversified, as the idea of strong complementarity between environmental protection and growth emerged in the green growth discourse. Adaptations of Schumpeterian and Keynesian economics identified investment in energy innovation and infrastructure as drivers of growth. We thus identify a major trans-formation from a neoclassical paradigm to a diversified policy discourse, suggesting that climate policy has entered a post-paradigmatic period. The diversification of ideas broadened policy advice from market-based policy to green industrial policy, including deployment subsidies and regulation.

How beneficial is basic energy access — typically lighting and mobile charging — for rural households? Despite research on the economic impacts of basic energy access, few studies have investigated how it changes household behavior. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, which identifies the behavioral impacts of providing solar lanterns to households that normally rely on kerosene as their primary source of lighting. Eighty-nine of the 184 households participating in the study were given a free, high-quality solar lantern. Comparing changes in responses from the baseline questionnaire and an endline questionnaire administered six months later, we find that the lanterns reduced energy expenditures, improved lighting, improved satisfaction with lighting, more use of lighting for domestic activities (e.g., reading), and improved satisfaction with lighting for domestic activities. Overall, our results show that basic energy access can offer substantial benefits within the households, even if broader rural economic transformation is not plausible.

International carbon markets are an appealing and increasingly popular tool to regulate carbon emissions. By putting a price on carbon, carbon markets reshape incentives faced by firms and reduce the value of emissions. How effective are carbon markets? Observers have tended to infer their effectiveness from market prices. The general belief is that a carbon market needs a high price in order to reduce emissions. As a result, many observers remain skeptical of initiatives such as the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), whose price remained low (compared to the social cost of carbon). In this paper, we assess whether the EU ETS reduced CO2 emissions despite low prices. We motivate our study by documenting that a carbon market can be effective if it is a credible institution that can plausibly become more stringent in the future. In such a case, firms might cut emissions even though market prices are low. In fact, low prices can be a signal that the demand for carbon permits weakens. Thus, low prices are compatible with successful carbon markets. To assess whether the EU ETS reduced carbon emissions even as permits were cheap, we estimate counterfactual carbon emissions using an original sectoral emissions dataset. We find that the EU ETS saved about 1.2 billion tons of CO2 between 2008 and 2016 (3.8%) relative to a world without carbon markets, or almost half of what EU governments promised to reduce under their Kyoto Protocol commitments. Emission reductions in sectors covered under the EU ETS were higher.

To ensure climate stability, the decarbonization of the global economy is necessary. Coal-fired power generation is both the most carbon-intensive form of electricity supply and associated with adverse health effects. Thus, retiring coal-fired power plants is essential for achieving the goals of the Paris agreement on climate change. Here we introduce a retirement index that ranks coal-fired power plants based on their age, carbon emissions, and potential for air pollution. Based on the index, the top plants identified for retirement are located in China, India and South Korea. This contrasts with the general approach in the current policy discourse, where older plants in developed countries are prioritized rather than younger plants in developing countries. China and India remain consistently the top countries with most capacity in need of retirement across several sensitivity checks.

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was BSP, the state’s Dalit party, able to reduce this inequality? Using data from a hundred thousand villages, we provide robust evidence for unequal outcomes. Villages inhabited solely by Dalits were 20 percentage points less likely to be covered by the program than villages without any Dalits. Moreover, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the electoral success of BSP failed to reduce such differences. These results highlight the magnitude and persistence of caste inequality in the implementation of democratic public policy, despite political representation.

How can demand for electricity be estimated without fine-grained usage data? Employing an original and large dataset, we develop a novel method for determining drivers of demand without electricity meter data. We first segment Indian consumers by their willingness to pay for electricity service, their level of usage, and their satisfaction with lighting, and then use cluster membership as a dependent variable in order to determine which household-level factors predict electricity usage. Our approach employs machine-learning and more traditional regression techniques to determine the optimal number of segments, generate the segments, and determine the predictors of segment membership. The dataset consists of more than 10,000 households in more than 200 villages in the states of Bihar, Odisha, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. We find that the rural Indian electricity market can be segmented into three clusters based on households’ willingness to pay, satisfaction with lighting, and appliance wattage. The clusters consist of potential customers, low-demand customers, and high-use customers. We then determine the predictors of membership in these clusters. We show that different types of consumers can be identified along easily observable measures. Moreover, we show that there are clear groups of consumers that vary along their satisfaction, willingness to pay, and existing appliance usage.

Across diverse geographies, mini-grids have been employed to provide energy access to off-grid and rural communities. In India, amid the government push to expand grid infrastructure, concerns have been raised about the viability of mini-grid business models that are largely run by private companies. While the role of mini-grids in previously un-electrified areas has been studied extensively, there exists limited empirical evidence regarding their uptake in grid-connected regions. In this paper, we analyze adoption and use of mini-grids among rural communities living in grid-electrified villages. The findings are based on the primary data of 2648 households and 544 non-farm enterprises from 54 villages in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India. Our results suggest that despite the presence of central-grid infrastructure, users adopt mini-grid in regions which lack reliable power supply. The mini-grid uptake was found to be relatively higher among non-farm enterprises, which, unlike households, have not received adequate policy attention and support. However, mini-grids were being used only for meeting basic lighting and cooling loads in most cases, primarily due to affordability concerns. Based on our findings, we argue that grid-interactive mini-grids could be used to serve rural enterprises as they value reliable power supply. Yet, the current low levels of electricity demand among non-farm rural enterprises suggest that growth in electricity demand and in turn enterprise productivity would require complementary services and infrastructure.

As both China and India are moving away from coal in the power sector, Southeast Asia has emerged as arguably the most important region for future growth in coal-fired power generation. Here we use data from the January 2017 edition of the Global Coal Plant Tracker to understand coal’s fortunes in the region. More specifically, we manipulate three key policy levers — attrition rate, capacity factor, and plant lifespan — to provide a timely update on the future of coal in Southeast Asia. Using improved estimates of the attrition rate for planned power plants and capacity factors in different countries, we find that status-quo trends in Southeast Asian coal-fired power generation would significantly hamper the region’s ability to contribute to global efforts to limit warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius in line with international agreements, namely the 2009 Copenhagen and 2016 Paris Agreements. Though meeting these targets may be possible if policymakers limit the entry into service of new coal power capacity and reduce use of existing units, qualitative evidence suggests that there may be a lack of political will to do so.

Widespread adoption of clean cooking fuels is a necessary step toward reducing household air pollution and improving population health. Here we use large-scale surveys (10,000 households) from two Indian states, Kerala and Rajasthan, to examine how education and attitudes toward cooking associate with the adoption of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), India’s most popular clean cooking fuel. We report three main results. First, education is a strong predictor of LPG adoption. Second, perceptions that LPG is good and affordable and progressive health-related perceptions are associated with LPG ownership. Third, and surprisingly, education does not predict positive attitudes toward clean cooking fuels. These results suggest that education leads to LPG adoption, but not through attitudinal changes. Further research should examine the mediators of the robust education-adoption association that we found.

Air pollution is a pressing problem of public health for developing countries, but governments have few incentives to abate air pollution without public awareness of the issue. Focusing on the case of Vietnam, we examine the determinants of public awareness of air pollution. Using representative survey data for the entire country from 2017, we find that local exposure to air pollution increases public awareness and reduces satisfaction with governments, but does not provoke opposition to coal-fired power generation. In contrast, education leads people to oppose coal-fired power plants. These results suggest that while local air pollution contributes to awareness and dissatisfaction with the government, support for effective policy measures depends on education levels.

Universal household electrification is a key component of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but the evidence base for social and economic impacts of electricity access remains unclear. Here we report results from a systematic review of impact evaluations of household electrification. We only find 31 studies that conduct statistical hypothesis tests to assess impacts. Among these, seven draw on a randomized experiment designed for causal inference. The randomized experimental studies generate fewer positive results than observational or quasi-experimental studies, such as correlational, instrumental variable, and difference-in-differences designs. These results call for a reassessment of what we know about the impacts of household electrification. They also call for major investment in impact evaluation of electricity access using randomized controlled trials, with a particular focus on when and how energy access interventions can furnish large benefits to their intended beneficiaries. Large-scale impact evaluations using experimental methods will require close collaboration between policymakers and researchers.

Nationwide transitions from cooking with solid fuels to clean fuels promise substantial health, climate, and environmental benefits. For decades, Ecuador has invested heavily in consumption subsidies for liquified petroleum gas (LPG), a leading clean fuel. With the goal of understanding household energy use in a context where LPG is ubiquitous and cheap, we administered 808 household surveys in peri-urban and rural communities in coastal and Andean Ecuadorian provinces. We assess cooking fuel ownership and use patterns after long-term LPG access and the reach of induction stoves promoted through a recent government program.

Nearly all participants reported using LPG for more than a decade and frequent, convenient access to highly subsidized LPG. Nonetheless, half of rural households and 20% of peri-urban households rely on firewood for cooking and to meet specific household energy needs, like space heating or heating water for bathing. Induction was rare and many induction owners reported zero use because the required equipment had never been installed by electricity companies, their stove had broken, or due to fears of high electricity costs.

Our discussion is instructive for other countries because of Ecuador’s long-standing clean fuel policies, robust LPG market and standardized cylinder recirculation model, and promotion of induction stoves.

Do elections affect legislators’ voting patterns? We investigate this question in the context of environmental policy in the US Congress. We theorize that since the general public is generally in favor of legislation protecting the environment, legislators have an incentive to favor the public over industry and vote for pro-environment legislation at election time. The argument is supported by analyses of data on environmental roll-call votes for the US Congress from 1970-2013 where we estimate the likelihood of casting a pro-environment as a function of the time to an election. While Democrats are generally more likely to cast a pro-environment vote before an election, this effect is much stronger for Republicans when the legislator won the previous election by a thinner margin. The election effect is maximized for candidates receiving substantial campaign contributions from the (anti-environment) oil and gas industry. Analysis of Twitter data confirms that Congress. members make pro-environmental statements and highlight their roll-call voting behavior during the election season. These results show that legislators do strategically adjust their voting behavior to favor the public immediate prior to an election.

Rural electrification has progressed unevenly across the world since 1945, with some rural communities gaining access to power decades earlier than others. We examine the association between early electrification and the quality of electricity service to households, testing the hypothesis that aging infrastructure compromises the quality of electricity service. Using the 2014-2015 ACCESS survey from rural India, we find that early electrification is associated with improvements in the quality of electricity service, even controlling for village size and distance to nearest town. A possible explanation for the finding is that early electrification generates economic gains that allow the rural community to invest in maintenance and upgrades.

Innovation is one of the most important drivers of economic development. Even in developing countries, households have access to a wide array of new technologies. However, factors affecting households’ technology adoption decisions remain poorly understood. Using data on solar microgrid adoption from rural India, we investigate the determinants of household technology adoption. We offer all households identical solar products to avoid bias from product differentiation. Households pay a monthly fee for technology use, allowing us to abstract away from credit constraints as a barrier to adoption. The results show that household expenditures and savings as well as the household head’s entrepreneurial attitude are strong predictors of adoption. In contrast, past fuel expenditures, risk acceptance, and community trust are not associated with technology adoption decisions. These findings suggest new directions for research on the microeconomics of household technology adoption, which is critical for sustainable development among the poor in developing countries.

What accounts for the persistence of inefficient subsidies? What are the obstacles to their reform? We examine the role of trust in government among farmers in explaining support for reforming India’s energy subsidies. The subsidies under study hold back efforts to provide a reliable supply of agricultural power and contribute to the unsustainable extraction of groundwater. This water-energy nexus in rural India represents both a poverty-perpetuating policy equilibrium and a crisis in environmental governance. Informed by interviews and focus groups, we conduct an original survey of 2,010 farmers in Bihar, Gujarat, and Rajasthan and analyze this data on the preferences of ‘vested interests’ — those most affected by potential reform — to demonstrate the crucial role of political trust, especially trust in the national government, in predicting farmers’ political support for reforms. Our findings have practical implications for environmental governance and rural development, and contribute to understanding the political economy of social policy reform in a developing democracy.

As the cost of distributed power generation continues to decrease, technologies such as solar home systems and micro-grids become increasingly attractive in the quest for energy access. Here we show, however, that national rural electrification planning mostly continues to ignore distributed power generation. A detailed review of the national rural electrification plans of the twenty countries with the largest numbers of non-electrified households shows that distributed power generation is usually absent or at best a minor component of the strategy. Our original contribution is thus to show where and how national rural electrification planning lags behind technology and business models, with guidelines for future research on explaining these patterns.

Stand-alone photovoltaic systems provide a potentially sustainable option for rural electrification, but the design and management of these systems is a challenge. Here we examine the ability of dynamic (real-time) pricing in off-grid systems to improve the durability of the batteries used to store power. In a randomized controlled trial with a pre-paid solar micro-grid in rural India, we found that dynamic pricing did not improve technical performance or customer satisfaction. The best explanation for the null finding is that, for various reasons, households minimized their power consumption and there was thus little need for demand management. These findings suggest that the low demand for power is a key challenge for the profitability of pre-paid off-grid systems.

I propose that vouchers offer a promising approach to making distributed power generation, such as solar home systems, affordable to consumers and profitable for producers and distributors. In a voucher-based system, governments give vouchers to eligible beneficiaries, who then use the vouchers to purchase qualifying products and services. This system enables consumer choice, helps the poor with the affordability of distributed energy products, and injects money into the market for relevant products and services. I discuss practical implementation challenges and argue that digitalization allows governments to significantly reduce corruption and red tape, making vouchers a realistic energy access policy for many governments all over the world.

Universal electricity access is an important element of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and global efforts to monitor progress in electrification have recently escalated. To inform these efforts, we describe a new database of total, rural, and urban electrification rates across the world. Using transparent coding criteria and decades of data, going back to 1960 for many countries, from nationally representative surveys and official reports from 124 non-OECD countries, we uncover evidence for rapid progress in household electrification relative to earlier estimates. Our comprehensive and freely available database offers a solid baseline for tracking progress in household electrification across the world. We confirm a robust association between per capita income and household electrification, and identify population density and urbanization as additional key drivers.

Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is by far the most popular clean cooking fuel in rural India, but how rural households use it remains poorly understood. Using the 2014-2015 ACCESS survey with over 8,500 households from six energy-poor Indian states, our study reports on results from a comprehensive survey of LPG use in rural India using a holistic approach to understanding the integration of a clean cooking fuel into rural household’s energy mixes. There are three principal findings: (i) fuel costs are a critical obstacle to widespread adoption, (ii) fuel stacking is the prevailing norm as few households stop using firewood when adopting LPG, and (iii) both users and non-users have highly positive views of LPG as a convenient and clean cooking fuel. These findings show that expanding LPG use offers great promise in rural India, but affordability prevents a complete transition from traditional biomass to clean cooking fuels.

Provision of energy for irrigation in a sustainable manner has become critical to the global food and livelihood security, particularly in the context of increasing fresh water scarcity and the risks associated with climate change. In this context, solar irrigation pumps (SIPs) have emerged as a promising alternative to diesel and electricity powered pump sets, particularly in developing countries. But, in view of the fiscal, environmental and socio-economic fallouts of past irrigation strategies, how can it be ensured that SIPs are deployed in a sustainable manner?
Based on a detailed literature review and semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders, we identify and discuss 14 factors, which would determine whether the use of SIPs in a given context is economically viable, socially acceptable and environmental sustainable. Drawing from the best practices and experiences in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, we also put forward key recommendations to incorporate sustainability concerns in the policies and programmes for SIPs deployment.

Fossil fuel subsidies strain public budgets, and contribute to climate change and local air pollution. Despite widespread agreement among experts about the benefits of reforming fossil fuel subsidies, repeated international commitments to eliminate them, and valiant efforts by some countries to reform them, they continue to persist. This book helps explain this conundrum, by exploring the politics of fossil fuel subsidies and their reform. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the book offers new case studies both from countries that have undertaken subsidy reform, and those that have yet to do so. It explores the roles of various intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions in promoting fossil fuel subsidy reform at the international level, as well as conceptual aspects of fossil fuel subsidies. This is essential reading for researchers and practitioners, and students of political science, international relations, law, public policy, and environmental studies.

Climate change mitigation relies increasingly on clean technologies such as renewable energy. Despite widespread success, further deployment of renewables has been met with resistance from voters and governments in several countries. How resilient is the renewable energy industry to adverse political events? I use the unexpected election of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential race to study this question. As a vocal critic of renewables and a supporter of fossil fuels, his election is a plausible negative shock to the renewable energy sector. I examine stock market data to gauge the reaction of investors. I find that renewable energy stocks were adversely affected by the election. Overall, they experienced a cumulative abnormal loss in share values of about 6% on average over the twenty days that followed the election. However, I find that the negative effect is concentrated among non-U.S. firms. U.S. firms, on average, emerged unscathed. Non-U.S. companies, on the other hand, lost over 14% of their value in the aftermath of the election. This suggests that markets are more concerned by increasing obstacles to international business than a decrease of federal support for renewables.

Governments apply a range of policy instruments to promote the electrification of personal transport using technologies such as Plug-in Hybrid, Battery Electric, and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles. We introduce a framework for comparing public policies cross-nationally used to support the research, development, and deployment of electric vehicles. We use this framework to identify whether governments are using similar policy instruments to promote vehicle electrification in the period 2006-2016. We also examine the extent to which policy instruments are neutral across technologies, presenting country case studies for China, the United States, Japan, and, within the regulatory framework of the European Union, Germany, and France. We find that governments have largely adopted technology neutral policies and are employing similar policy mixes in promoting vehicle electrification, despite differences in governing institutions between the countries examined. We conclude by suggesting a future research agenda, including identifying plausible explanations for this outcome.

The term “global South” refers to developing countries as a whole, but recently, numerous developing countries — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Thailand, South Africa, and others — simultaneously grew wealthier while many other countries remain poor. This prompts a fundamental question: does the global South demonstrate unity in international politics, with developing countries at various wealth levels behaving like one another, and in ways unlike the industrialized “North”? Or is the global South fractured, too economically and politically diverse to operate in tandem? Theoretical expectations are mixed, and the empirical record is inconclusive. To adjudicate, we pinpoint a stringent set of observable implications that should hold if the developing world is to be considered at all unified vis-a-vis the industrialized world. Then we probe those implications with statistical analyses of over 3,600 paragraphs of text from governments’ negotiations concerning trade and environmental policy, a policy space that facilitates generalizability by representing fundamental sovereignty and wealth issues underlying traditional North-South frictions. Our finding — that overall, developing countries exhibit surprising unity — weighs in on central theoretical and policy debates in international relations, comparative politics, and political economy.

Even if oil prices have recovered from their plunge in 2014, this article argues that the oil industry is unlikely to return to the status quo ex ante. Two profound shifts in technology and markets are dramatically changing the longer-term outlook for the oil industry. In the short term, traditional producers will feel persistent pressure from the shale revolution, a disruptive technology that has altered the cost curve and elasticity of oil supply. In the medium term, the industry must confront a structural slowdown and eventual peak in demand owing to innovation and evolving consumer preferences, related in part to concerns over climate change. Together, these shifts reflect a new energy order in which oil is no longer an exhaustible resource, new trading patterns emerge, and oil prices exhibit greater short-term volatility amid a long-term declining trend. These new rules of the game force us to reconsider some of the theories and concepts of the international political economy of oil. We flag three key political effects from these market shifts: (1) key oil-producing states face economic and political turmoil; (2) the Organization of the Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) cannot influence the price of oil in the long term by cutting output; and (3) power is redistributed in the international system.

What is the relationship between political institutions and air pollution generated by the power sector? Here we focus on the association between democracy and power generated from coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Using a new dataset on coal-fired power plants commissioned between 1980 and 2016 in 71 countries, we find that the relationship between democracy and coal varies according to the environmental Kuznets curve logic. Democratic political institutions at lower levels of economic development are correlated with increased commissioning of coal power plants, as governments seek to appeal to an electorate prioritizing economic growth and affordable energy access. As a country becomes richer, democracy comes to have a negative association with coal power, as clean air becomes a more salient issue for the public.

Given the size and growth prospects of the Indian economy, the Indian power sector plays a key role in the global effort to mitigate climate change. Here we use the January 2017 edition of the Coal Tracker database to understand the future prospects for Indian coal. Using improved lower and upper bounds for potential construction and capacity factors, we find that lifetime emissions over the next five decades from Indian coal-fired power generation could range from 18 to 39 gigatons. The single most important way to reduce these emissions is to reduce the average lifespan of plants, as neither falling capacity factors nor lower construction rates bring India’s power sector in line with the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius. Our estimations show that reducing the lifespan of plants from 40 to 30 years alone can decrease cumulative CO2 emissions by approximately 12 gigatons, which is equivalent to saving 5.8% of the global carbon budget for the two degrees Celsius target.

Realizing the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2 °C by the end of this century will most likely require deployment of carbon-negative technologies. It is particularly important that China, as the world’s top carbon emitter, avoids being locked into carbon-intensive, coal-fired power-generation technologies and undertakes a smooth transition from high- to negative-carbon electricity production. We focus here on deploying a combination of coal and biomass energy to produce electricity in China using an integrated gasification cycle system combined with carbon capture and storage (CBECCS). Such a system will also reduce air pollutant emissions, thus contributing to China’s near-term goal of improving air quality. We evaluate the bus-bar electricity-generation prices for CBECCS with mixing ratios of crop residues varying from 0 to 100%, as well as associated costs for carbon mitigation and cobenefits for air quality. We find that CBECCS systems employing a crop residue ratio of 35% could produce electricity with net-zero life-cycle emissions of greenhouse gases, with a levelized cost of electricity of no more than 9.2 US cents per kilowatt hour. A carbon price of approximately $52.0 per ton would make CBECCS cost-competitive with pulverized coal power plants. Therefore, our results provide critical insights for designing a CBECCS strategy in China to harness near-term air-quality cobenefits while laying the foundation for achieving negative carbon emissions in the long run.

Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, both national and subnational governments have been encouraged to submit Mid-Century Strategies, outlining how they would reach their deep decarbonization goals. However, research on the design and potential of these strategies has been very limited. To address this shortcoming, here we assess 13 such strategies – six national, seven subnational – in a comparative fashion. We find that the energy-economy-climate models underpinning these strategies are generally of high quality, though national jurisdictions generally performed better. However, most strategies are not plausible without significant changes to policy, and the industrial sector in particular presents a major limitation. The strategies are helpful in revealing this gap, but much works remains to be done for plausible mid-century decarbonization trajectories to become a reality. We also find that public input and societal participation in strategy building were a double-edged sword depending on the constellation of domestic preferences.

Governmental Mid-Century Strategies for deep decarbonization are underpinned by high-quality energy-economy-climate models
Governments’ proposed strategies require significant new policies, as even among jurisdictions that have an MCS, extant policies are insufficient to achieve deep decarbonization
No jurisdiction studied has yet put forward a plausible decarbonization policy for the industrial sector
Public input and societal participation can be a double-edged sword: they can increase durability of the strategy but also enable opposing forces to mobilize against ambitious changes

The health co-benefits of CO2 mitigation can provide a strong incentive for climate policy through reductions in air pollutant emissions that occur when targeting shared sources. However, reducing air pollutant emissions may also have an important co-harm, as the aerosols they form produce net cooling overall. Nevertheless, aerosol impacts have not been fully incorporated into cost-benefit modeling that estimates how much the world should optimally mitigate. Here we find that when both co-benefits and co-harms are taken fully into account, optimal climate policy results in immediate net benefits globally, overturning previous findings from cost-benefit models that omit these effects. The global health benefits from climate policy could reach trillions of dollars annually, but will importantly depend on the air quality policies that nations adopt independently of climate change. Depending on how society values better health, economically optimal levels of mitigation may be consistent with a target of 2 °C or lower.

One of the great questions for scholars of international relations and economics concerns the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the natural environment. Does membership in the multilateral trade regime constrain environmental regulation and increase the environmental burden of national economies? Do countries pay a heavy environmental price for trade liberalization? Although this question has been debated extensively, there is little statistical evidence to contribute to the debate. We provide a comprehensive statistical analysis of the environmental effects of joining the multilateral trade regime. We collected data on a variety of environmental policies, institutions, and outcomes that should be influenced by GATT/WTO membership if the predictions of environmental pessimists or optimists are valid. A wide range of statistical models designed to identify the causal effect of the GATT/WTO on the environmental indicators shows that joining the GATT/WTO does not have negative effects on environmental quality.

Despite the growing use of impact evaluations for electrification interventions, little attention has been paid to the geographical distribution of such evaluations. This is concerning because cultural and regional differences may limit how transferable results across regions are. We undertake a systematic review of the literature and find 31 impact evaluations of electricity access in 16 countries that meet our criteria for statistical hypothesis testing of development outcomes. India accounts for a quarter of the impact evaluations. Given the large non-electrified population in India, this is still a small number, roughly comparable to Nigeria or Kenya. South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the most underrepresented regions. We find more positive impacts from electricity access, on average, for South Asia than for sub-Saharan Africa, which calls for greater attention to geographical bias in future impact evaluations of electrification access.

Using comprehensive data on power generation and energy access, we explore associations between coal-fired power generation and household electrification. We find that, although there is a strong between-country correlation between coal-fired power generation capacity and electricity access, the correlation disappears when we focus on within-country variation and control for secular trends. Further, statistical analyses using dynamic panel models show no evidence for the effect of coal-fired generation capacity on electrification rates. These results suggest that increases in coal-fired power generation may not have played an important role in promoting rural electrification in recent decades, calling into question the relationship between coal-fired power generation and energy access. The findings also imply that rural electrification can advance without the greenhouse gas emissions from coal combustion in electricity generation.

Clean cooking fuels promise substantial health benefits for rural households, but almost three billion people continue to rely on traditional biomass for their cooking needs. We explore the role of gender in the adoption of LPG, a clean cooking fuel, in rural India. Given that women are responsible for most households’ cooking needs, we propose that gender inequality is an obstacle to LPG adoption because men may fail to appreciate the full benefits of clean cooking fuels. Using data for 8,563 households from the ACCESS survey, we demonstrate that households where women participate in decision-making are more likely to adopt LPG for cooking than households in which a man is the sole decision-maker. We extend our analytic framework to evaluate the relationship between household characteristics and LPG and firewood use. Access and cylinder costs were both negatively associated with LPG use and while LPG adoption reduced firewood use, fuel stacking remains the norm in study households. This study has implications for future policy designs to increase LPG adoption and use to obtain the multiple benefits of cleaner cooking.

Off-grid solar systems have a number of advantages in developing countries, but they rely on the capacity of private entrepreneurs to develop a reliable customer base and methods for recruiting these customers. This study uses data from 68,600 customers of BBOXX, a London-based off-grid solar power company, to classify customers and explore the demographic and recruitment factors associated with customer behavior. We compare a non-parametric clustering method for customer segmentation with linear models of customer behavior. The results show a number of important demographic and geographic factors that influence recruitment of the company’s core customers, and demonstrates how linear models can be misleading. For example, women and those recruited by agent advertising or word-of-mouth are more likely in the company’s core clientele, even though the linear models suggest that they may be less profitable customers.

National oil companies (NOCs) have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign oil and gas assets. Why have some governments increased their NOC outward investments, while others have not? I argue that domestic structures can influence a government’s calculus that potential benefits, such as added revenues and fuel supply, outweigh potential costs, such as information asymmetries and inefficiencies associated with NOCs. Nationally, partisan competition limits democratic tolerance for failures by NOCs. Bureaucratically, overlapping authority in energy policy undermines coherent NOC governance. Based on investments by NOCs hailing from 79 countries, 2000-2013, I find robust evidence for the national hypothesis.

As the world’s largest proposed infrastructure program, China’s Belt and Road Initiative will have significant implications for water security, sustainability, and the future of energy generation in Asia. Pakistan, a keystone of the Belt and Road Initiative, presents an ideal case for assessing the impacts of the Initiative’s energy financing. We estimate the future water demands of seven new Chinese-financed, coal-fired power plants in Pakistan with a total capacity of 6600 MW. While these facilities may help address Pakistan’s energy shortages, our results indicate that by 2055, climate change-induced water stress in Pakistan will increase by 36–92% compared to current levels, and the power plants’ new water demands will amount to ~79.68 million m3. Our findings highlight the need for China and the Belt and Road Initiative’s destination countries to integrate resilience and sustainability efforts into energy infrastructure planning. Policy recommendations are offered to permit both sustainable development and responsible water resource management.

Rural electrification has the potential to transform rural lives and livelihoods by allowing households to use a variety of electric appliances. However, empirical evidence on how rural electrification translates into appliance ownership and usage remains understudied across contexts. Here we use data from the 2014-2015 ACCESS survey in six energy-poor states of India to understand the dynamics of appliance stock accumulation as a function of time since electrification. We find that, controlling for a number of variables, each additional year of electricity access leads to: 1) incrementally higher ownership rates of more power-intensive appliances, 2) increased likelihood of a higher total stock of appliances, and 3) increased probability of owning key appliances, especially TVs, fans, and pressure cookers. These results may help to explain why short-term impact evaluations sometimes find weak evidence for benefits of rural electrification; they also underscore the importance of realistic forecasts of energy demand growth over time after rural electrification.

After decades of failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector, several jurisdictions have in rapid succession announced future goals to phase out sales of internal combustion engine vehicles. This article argues that these announcements are predominantly a form of political signaling in a green industrial policy competition for alternative transport technologies, notably electric vehicles. We show that such signaling games in green industrial policy are likely to emerge when market growth for alternative technologies initiates industrial policy competition, which explains the clustered timing of political signals. A country’s position in the global auto industry, however, shapes the domestic political economy for announcing a phaseout goal. Countries with aspirations to develop export-oriented EV industries seek industrial upgrading; countries with existing export-oriented auto industries promote industrial renewal to maintain international competitiveness; and importing countries pursue phaseout goals primarily for environmental reasons. Our findings suggest that industrial upgraders can induce incumbent producer countries to participate in green industrial policy competition, leading to the “trading up” of energy technology policy goals. This contrasts with classic patterns of environmental policy competition, in which advanced industrialized nations are the pacesetters.

While rural electrification has been a high priority for many governments in the developing world, the factors that make individual households more likely to pay for a connection have received insufficient attention. In particular, many studies have dealt with the role of affordability of grid connections, but they have generally avoided studying the effects of service quality. Estimating the effect of quality on willingness of potential customers to pay is a difficult task because of self-selection — if quality is important, those in higher quality service areas are more likely to have a connection. Using household data from rural India, we estimate a Heckman selection model to deal with this issue and find a substantial impact of quality on willingness to pay for a connection in India. The results suggest that improving the quality of connections is critical to improving access.

Quality of electricity service remains poor in many developing countries. Here we examine factors that influence stated willingness to pay for better service (i.e., more hours of power per day) among rural and urban households in Uttar Pradesh, India. Besides suggesting that low willingness to pay is a major obstacle to pricing reform, we find that respondents with more social trust are willing to pay more. In a randomized survey experiment, we also find that delays in service improvements and a lack of community support for pricing reform reduce willingness to pay. These results confirm the importance of non-financial considerations in popular support for policies that impose higher prices in exchange for better service. However, we do not find evidence for sense of entitlement — the belief that government should offer basic goods and services for free — as a predictor of low willingness to pay. These results offer useful input for effective strategies to reform electricity pricing for better service and, ultimately, economic growth, particularly in areas where electricity is heavily underpriced and where governance is weak.

A reliable supply of electricity is essential for economic development, and developing countries across the world have implemented reforms to improve their power sector performance. We publish a dataset of power sector reforms in 142 developing countries from 1982 to 2013 and use the data to describe patterns of variation. We find that privatization and liberalization of competition continue to lag behind other reforms, such as allowing independent power producers and establishing electricity regulators. However, this gap is only wide for relatively poor and authoritarian countries with low institutional capacity. Hybrid power markets remain a reality, but economic growth and democratization can move power sectors in emerging economies to a different direction. If developing economies continue to expand their economies, build state capacity, and move toward democratic political institutions, then we may see more private electric utilities and competition for profits in the future.

One of the most important technical features of a power system is its ability to deliver electricity reliably to the customers. Based on interviews with 12 energy service companies (ESCO) currently operating solar micro-grids in northern rural India, this study identified important factors related to technical design, customer behaviour and operations and management (O&M) that may result in contingencies in service. In addition, the study presents companies’ innovative solutions to overcome these problems. Initially, the interview method allowed only a rough qualitative comparison of different reliability levels as the availability of comparable data was limited. We found that a more descriptive method for reliability assessment would create equally valuable information on renewable off-grid energy projects. We propose a simple framework for assessing reliability that highlights the particular features of off-grid areas in developing countries.

Remote sensing data has the potential to revolutionize social science. One of the most prominent examples of this is the Nighttime Lights dataset, which provides digital measures of nighttime luminosity from 1992 to 2013. This study evaluates the Nighttime Lights data against detailed rural electrification data from the 2011 Census of India. The results suggest that many nighttime luminosity measures derived from satellite data are surprisingly accurate for measuring rural electrification, even at the village level and using simple statistical tools. We also demonstrate that this accuracy can be substantially improved by using of better GIS maps, basic geoprocessing tools, and particular aggregations of nighttime luminosity. Nighttime luminosity performs worse in measuring financial inclusion or proxies of poverty, however, and detects rural electrification less accurately when the supply of power is intermittent. These results offer guidelines for when and how remote sensing data can be used when administrative data is absent or unreliable.

The World Bank’s Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy (RISE) scorecard evaluates countries’ sustainable energy policies against global `best practices.’ Here I demonstrate that many of these so-called best practices are inappropriate in the context of limited state capacity. Using several examples from the RISE report, I argue that the World Bank should replace the pursuit of one-size-fits-all best practices and instead focus on generating knowledge about the contextual fit of different policy approaches. Drawing inspiration from research on adaptive reform strategies in the developing country context, I argue that an adaptive and flexible strategy could help national governments to surmount obstacles to policies that over time make the dream of sustainable energy for all a global reality.

In June 2017, the Trump administration decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, a landmark climate agreement adopted in 2015 by 195 nations. The exit of the U.S. has not just raised concern that the U.S. will miss its domestic emission reduction targets, but also that other parties to the Paris Agreement might backtrack on their initial pledges regarding emission reductions or financial contributions. Here we assess the magnitude of the threat that U.S. non-cooperation poses to the Paris Agreement from an international relations perspective. We argue that U.S. non-cooperation does not fundamentally alter U.S. emissions, which will likely continue to decline even in the absence of new federal climate policies. Nor does it undermine nationally determined contributions under pledge and review, as the Paris Agreement has introduced a new logic of domestically-driven climate policies and the cost of low-carbon technologies keeps falling. However, U.S. non-participation in raising climate finance could raise high barriers to global climate cooperation in the future. Political strategies to mitigate these threats include direct engagement by climate leaders such as the European Union with key emerging economies, notably China and India, and domestic climate policies that furnish benefits to traditional opponents of ambitious climate policy.

Sectoral interests play an important role in distributive politics, but their influence is difficult to measure. We compare the effect of international oil prices on subsidies for domestic gasoline and diesel consumption. Because diesel is used by a smaller number of organized agricultural and transportation interests, they are more capable of collective action than the dispersed beneficiaries of gasoline subsidies. The conventional wisdom holds that sectoral interests could mobilize to stop reform (e.g., price increases, deregulation). Challenging this view, we consider the possibility that sectoral interests promote reform by facilitating the targeted allocation of compensation and exemptions. An empirical analysis of gasoline and diesel prices, 1991-2012, strongly supports the second hypothesis: diesel prices respond to international oil prices more strongly than do gasoline prices. Quantitative tests and case studies allow us to explore causal mechanisms, verify that the gasoline-diesel difference is related to actual policy reforms, and reject alternative explanations.

We investigate the determinants of distributed solar technology adoption at the village and household level in India. Using spatial data on insolation, census records, and original surveys, we show that remote and poor but large villages with abundant sunshine have led the wave of solar technology adoption as an alternative to grid electricity. At the household level, however, wealth and financial access are positively associated with solar technology adoption, a result that holds for both solar lanterns and home systems. Moreover, remote villages are more likely to see solar technology adoption when households have access to finance through banks. We also find that the use of household solar technology is strongly associated with a household’s subjective satisfaction with domestic lighting. These results demonstrate that understanding solar technology adoption in geographies requires considering both community and household characteristics. They also underscore the importance of financial access as a precondition for using distributed solar power as an alternative to grid connectivity.