IRENA as a glocal actor: pathways towards energy governmentality

Abstract

For decades renewable energy has remained a “blind spot” within the sphere of international energy governance. The existing institutional network is highly fragmented, resulting in a myriad of international organizations, which all claim to deal with energy issues, yet do not focus on renewables on a global scale. Since 2009, IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, seeks to fill up this vacuum, thereby creating a new (and maybe more Southern-led) political arena for governing renewable energy issues. This article focuses on IRENA’s role as a changemaker in the sphere of global energy governance by investigating IRENA’s governance practices and contributions to knowledge production.

Keywords:

• global energy governance
• international organizations
• governmentality
• renewable energy

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express gratitude to two anonymous peer reviewers, as well as to Angela Oels and Michèle Knodt for their highly valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Transformation knowledge refers to “questions about technical, social legal, cultural and other possible means of acting that aim to transform existing practices and introduce desired ones” (Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn 2007, 36), and can be differentiated from others forms of knowledge, particularly target knowledge and system knowledge (see Bechmann et al. 2009).

2. In contrast, Lesage and van de Graaf would rather suggest a hub-and-spoke mode of governance, with the OECD, albeit carefully opened to emerging powers, as “the hub”, because this would prevent the risks of flexible governance and would rely on the technical and cognitive power of the OECD (Lesage and van de Graaf 2013, 91).

3. The CEM consists mainly of OECD ministers, but also includes Brazil, China, South Africa and Mexico; see http://cleanenergyministerial.org

4. The “resource pair templates” refer to the different political and economic resources that need to be activated for a successful energy transition. This includes the four factors “National Energy Policy and Strategy”, “Institutions and Regulations”, “Energy Resources/Technologies/Markets and Infrastructure”, and the development of a “Business Model”. For each of these factors, the templates seek to file the current status, issues that need to be resolved, capacity needs and lastly the opportunities and actions (IRENA 2013a, 24; RRA Design to Action).

5. In closer detail these consultation activities include appropriate capacity-building needs, for instance the creation of an enabling environment for renewables; future industry investment analysis, decision-making and government policy development; strategies to develop absorptive capacities for technology uptake and adaptation to take advantage of regional/global opportunities (IRENA 2013a, 39).