Institutional Transplant as Political Opportunity: The Practice and Politics of Indian Electricity Regulation

India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention. This paper will explore the origins of electricity regulation as a form of institutional isomorphism. It will then compare the regulatory experience in India\u27s electricity sector across two Indian states to understand the implications of transplanting regulatory agencies in the global south. An examination of the process through which regulatory decisions are reached illustrates how existing bureaucratic and technocratic networks, transplanted procedures, and administrative cultures combine to conservatively manage long-standing political tensions around electricity. In seeking to manage those tensions, regulators often take decisions - on tariff setting, for example - based on a political reading that belies the technocratic narrative on which institutional credibility rests. At the same time, civil society groups ranging from residential associations to professional associations to individuals are using newly created regulatory spaces to structure a more deliberative decision process

The Thin Green Line: World Bank Leverage and Forest Policy Reform in Papua New Guinea

This study was originally commissioned by the World Resources Institute as part of a comparative analysis of the use of adjustment loan conditions as an instrument of forest policy reform in four countries − Cameroon, Kenya, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It is partly based on an exhaustive analysis of published and unpublished documents relating to the World Bank’s role in the reform of national forest policy, and partly based on a series of interviews conducted with some of the ‘key players’ in that process on a not-for-attribution basis. These interviews were conducted in Port Moresby and Washington by Colin Filer, Navroz Dubash and Kilyali Kalit from December 1998 to December 1999. An initial draft of this study was presented and discussed at a workshop convened by the World Resources Institute in Washington in April 1999, where additional feedback was obtained from those in attendance, including World Bank staff engaged in a review of the Bank’s policy and strategy in the forest sector. This has since been revised, updated and expanded by the principal author to take account of subsequent political events in Papua New Guinea, and also to reflect some of the findings of the comparative study which is being separately published by the World Resources Institute (Seymour and Dubash 2000).World Resources Institut

Mainstreaming climate change in state development planning : an analysis of Karnataka’s action plan on climate change

Flanked by the Arabian Sea, Karnataka is a coastal state in the south west of India where owing to encroachment, pollution and infrastructural activity in the state, lakes and bodies of water are disappearing. The climate plan in Karnataka is the outcome of three distinct efforts resulting in three parallel documents. A formal plan has been produced by the Environmental Management and Policy Research Institute (EMPRI). Part of a larger project “Global Administrative Law: Improving Inter-institutional Connections in Global and National Regulatory Governance,” this report reviews the development of climate change planning processes in India, specific to various bio-regions

Mapping global energy governance

10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00119.xGlobal Policy2SUPPL.16-1

Introduction to the special issue: Governing energy in a fragmented world

10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00131.xGlobal Policy2SUPPL.11-

The thin green line: World Bank leverage and forest policy reform in Papua New Guinea

This monograph tells the story of the World Bank's efforts to defend or advance the cause of forest policy reform in Papua New Guinea by means of conditions attached to a series of structural adjustment loans which have been advanced or offered to the national government from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 1999. Papua New Guinea is one of the few countires in the world in which the Bank has sought to influence the course of national forest policy in this way, and one of an even smaller number of client countries in which it can claim to have had some success in doing so. This case study therefore throws an important light on current international debates about the Bank's engagment with the exploitation or conservation of natural tropical forests, and about its choice of policy instruments for achieving its environmental goals

Algebraic Many-Body Localization and its implications on information propagation

We probe the existence of a many-body localized phase (MBL-phase) in a spinless fermionic Hubbard chain with algebraically localized single-particle states, by investigating both static and dynamical properties of the system. This MBL-phase can be characterized by an extensive number of integrals of motion which develop algebraically decaying tails, unlike the case of exponentially localized single-particle states. We focus on the implications for the quantum information propagation through the system. We provide evidence that the bipartite entanglement entropy after a quantum quench has an unbounded algebraic growth in time, while the quantum Fisher information grows logarithmically

Institutional Transplant as Political Opportunity: The Practice and Politics of Indian Electricity Regulation

India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention. This paper will explore the origins of electricity regulation as a form of institutional isomorphism. It will then compare the regulatory experience in India\u27s electricity sector across two Indian states to understand the implications of transplanting regulatory agencies in the global south. An examination of the process through which regulatory decisions are reached illustrates how existing bureaucratic and technocratic networks, transplanted procedures, and administrative cultures combine to conservatively manage long-standing political tensions around electricity. In seeking to manage those tensions, regulators often take decisions - on tariff setting, for example - based on a political reading that belies the technocratic narrative on which institutional credibility rests. At the same time, civil society groups ranging from residential associations to professional associations to individuals are using newly created regulatory spaces to structure a more deliberative decision process

National climate change mitigation legislation, strategy and targets : a global update

Global climate change governance has changed substantially in the last decade, with a shift in focus from negotiating globally agreed greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets to nationally determined contributions, as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. This paper analyses trends in adoption of national climate legislation and strategies, GHG targets, and renewable and energy efficiency targets in almost all UNFCCC Parties, focusing on the period from 2007 to 2017. The uniqueness and added value of this paper reside in its broad sweep of countries, the more than decade-long coverage and the use of objective metrics rather than normative judgements. Key results show that national climate legislation and strategies witnessed a strong increase in the first half of the assessed decade, likely due to the political lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, but have somewhat stagnated in recent years, currently covering 69% of global GHG emissions (almost 50% of countries). In comparison, the coverage of GHG targets increased considerably in the run up to adoption of the Paris Agreement and 93% of global GHG emissions are currently covered by such targets. Renewable energy targets saw a steady spread, with 79% of the global GHG emissions covered in 2017 compared to 45% in 2007, with a steep increase in developing countries. Key policy insightsThe number of countries that have national legislation and strategies in place increased strongly up to 2012, but the increase has levelled off in recent years, now covering 69% of global emissions by 2017 (49% of countries and 76% of global population).Economy-wide GHG reduction targets witnessed a strong increase in the build up to 2015 and are adopted by countries covering 93% of global GHG emissions (81% not counting USA) and 91% of global population (86% not counting USA) in 2017.Renewable energy targets saw a steady increase throughout the last decade with coverage of countries in 2017 comparable to that of GHG targets.Key shifts in national measures coincide with landmark international events – an increase in legislation and strategy in the build-up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference and an increase in targets around the Paris Agreement – emphasizing the importance of the international process to maintaining national momentum.</p