The dismantling of renewable energy policy in Italy

ABSTRACT

The expansion of renewables is still dependent on appropriate policy support. Nonetheless, in the wake of the economic crisis, even pioneer European countries have begun to dismantle the set of measures implemented in the past decades. Policy dismantling in the area of renewable energy is a recent phenomenon that has attracted little attention in comparison to the study of the diffusion of support schemes. By focusing on the dismantling of renewable energy policy in Italy, this contribution helps fill this gap and highlights an important aspect of the current politics of energy transition. It shows how interactions between the political economy of the renewable energy sector, policy design, institutional constraints and external events affect policy dismantling. It also demonstrates the role of self-undermining mechanisms and framing effects in the dismantling of renewable energy policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy dismantling
• Italy
• renewable energy
• political economy
• policy feedback
• policy framing

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous referees and the EP editor Anthony Zito for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Rainer Quitzow for his comments on earlier versions of this contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gürtler et al. (2019) also focused on the possible influence of the political economy of the (renewable) energy policy sector on macro-level factors. However, I have not considered this dimension in this contribution.

2. As Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 229) explains, extreme cases are particularly suitable for generalization: they reveal more information because they activate more actors and study more key mechanisms of the situation.

3. Italy abandoned nuclear energy in 1987 after the Chernobyl disaster.