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Abstract
Surging world energy prices, increasing oil market volatility and a nascent ‘energy transition’ are posing major challenges for global energy governance. In response, there has been a proliferation in the number of multilateral bodies addressing energy issues in recent years, and a wide range of organisations now claim a role in facilitating intergovernmental energy cooperation. However, the practical achievements of these organisations have been very poor, with all suffering difficulties that have limited their ability to promote shared energy interests between states. This article examines the dynamics of multilateral energy organisations, arguing that the political economy features of energy – securitisation and attendant patterns of economic nationalism – explain why they have failed to develop more robust cooperative mechanisms. Ten global-level organisations are evaluated and found to suffer from membership, design or commitment issues that limit their effectiveness in global energy governance. These challenges are linked to the securitisation of energy, which has led governments to favour low-cost soft-law approaches over potentially more effective hard-law institutional designs. Moreover, the securitisation of energy poses limits for how far multilateral energy cooperation can proceed and means that contemporary efforts to strengthen these organisations are unlikely to succeed in coming years.
Notes on contributors
Jeffrey D. Wilson is a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. His research interests include international political economy, economic regionalism in the Asia-Pacific, and international resource politics. He has published widely on the political economy of resource security in Asia, and is the author of Governing Global Production: Resource Networks in the Asia-Pacific Steel Industry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Notes
The author would like to thank Mark Beeson, Shahar Hameiri, Anita John, Andrew Phillips, Silke Trommer, Feng Zhang and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on prior versions of this paper.
1. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Latin American Energy Organisation and European Union each also manage energy cooperation at the regional level.
2. Author's compilation, from IEA (Citation2012).
3. APEC and the East Asia Summit are nominally ‘Asian’ regional organisations. However, the presence of important extra-regional players (the USA, Australia and Russia), alongside their large shares of world energy trade, means their activities are arguably global in scope.
4. Author's summary, from IEF (Citation2012b) and GECF (Citation2012c).
5. Author's summary, from APEC (Citation2012).
6. Author's summary, from ASEAN (Citation2012).
7. Particularly the second and third East Asia Summits (2007) and the 2007, 2008 and 2010 APEC Summits.
8. As per the EAS's Cebu Declaration (EAS Citation2007); and APEC's Energy Policy Principles and Energy Security Initiative (APEC Citation1996, Citation2001).
9. Author's summary, from APEC (Citation2012) and DFAT (Citation2012).
10. While GATT Article XI bans all quantitative trade restrictions, exceptions in Article XX covering natural resources allow quantitative restrictions to be applied on the grounds of conservation, local processing and/or ‘local or general short supply’.
11. Unsurprisingly, seven of the G20 members failed to implement this commitment at all, on the basis of self-evaluated claims that their fossil-fuel subsidies were not ‘inefficient’ and therefore exempt. See G20 Information Centre (Citation2012: 362–4).
12. OPEC is an outlier here, as the sole hard-law organisation that comprises resource nationalists. This is due to the fact that OPEC is a producer cartel, and its cooperative efforts (collective interventions aimed at managing world oil prices) are therefore consistent with nationalistic energy policies.
13. This could be achieved by creating some form of ‘associate member’ status that exempts members from certain institutional rules. This has been proposed as a possible direction for the IEA's recent ‘outreach’ agreements with China, India, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and South Africa. See Van de Graaf (Citation2012: 239).