Fragmentation in Global Energy Governance: Explaining the Creation of IRENA

Thijs Van de Graaf
Additional contact information
Thijs Van de Graaf: Thijs Van de Graaf is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ghent Institute for International Studies, Ghent University, Belgium.

Global Environmental Politics, 2013, vol. 13, issue 3, 14-33

Abstract: In 2009, a group of member countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA) spearheaded the creation of a new international organization, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), despite the fact that the IEA had been working on renewables for decades. Why would states create an overlapping organization, thus advancing the overall degree of fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Mansfield and Moravcsik, this article provides an explanation based on domestic preferences and institutional capture. Viewed thus, IRENA was part of an institutional hedging strategy instigated by domestic actors in Germany and allied states to counter the IEA's alleged normative bias toward the fossil and nuclear energy industries with a wider set of alternative energy options. The article suggests that, depending on the domestic preferences of a set of states capable to innovate, the transaction costs associated with institutional reform may surmount those of institutional creation. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: global energy governance; International Energy Agency; International Renewable Energy Agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q40 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00181 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:13:y:2013:i:3:p:14-33

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().