ABSTRACT
The present analysis seeks to explore how energy policy is used in Brazil, Russia, India, and China as a state capacity instrument to create policies that underpin institutional complementarities. Analysing energy policy makes it possible to identify the institutional bundles that circumscribe semi-peripheral capitalism. First, there are the various domestic institutions that shape the main trends in energy policy. Second is the panorama of federalism dilemmas that affected energy policies in the 1990s and which is important for understanding market reforms as well as for the evaluation of the centralisation movement that occurred in the following decade. The third is the role of administrative reforms, or the absence thereof, in order to understand the capacity of bureaucratic cohesion as a coordinating element of energy policies. And, finally, the role of public banks and state-owned energy companies as instruments of policy support as well as routes to circumventing the centrifugal mechanisms.
