ABSTRACT
The governance of energy, whether national or international in scope, requires cooperation between public and private actors. Private companies are major producers as well as major consumers of energy, and are key players in the development of new technologies. However, public policymakers constrain private energy producers through regulatory measures and attempts at correcting market failures, but they also set incentives for them to develop or deploy new technologies. In turn, regulatory governance has become highly dependent on the expertise, monitoring, and implementation capacities of private actors. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements also have stakes in energy governance, because it impacts on values they promote, such as socio-economic development, social justice, and ecological sustainability. They can support policies, or campaign against them. As outlined in the introductory chapter, every national energy policy has an international dimension. Natural resources are scarce and unevenly distributed, and negative externalities of energy production and consumption affect people across borders. In the absence of an international energy organization to deal comprehensively with all dimensions of energy governance we are faced with a polycentric and multi-level system of governance (Cherp, Jewell and Goldthau, 2011). Such a system provides private actors with multiple access points 2 (Princen and Kerremans, 2008).
