Suchergebnisse

This book provides a comprehensive account of EU's renewable energy policy development as it traces the agenda-shaping, policy formulation and decision-making phases of the EU's secondary legislation on renewable energy - that is the three successive directives of 2001 (RES-E), 2009 (RED), and 2018 (RED II). It also explores the EU's energy policymaking dynamics and assess integration outcomes of these three policymaking instances in the renewable energy field from a comparative perspective. Enriched with elite interviews with the Brussels policy community, and drawing on European integration and public policy literature, the proposed book will resonate with and offer relevant insights to students, scholars, stakeholders, and policymakers interested in EU energy policy, in particular, and European integration, in general.

International Relations' research has been particularly active in the past two decades when it comes to Russian energy policy. Although vast amounts of academic literature on energy issues associated with Russia have enriched the discipline, diversity on the level of theory is yet to blossom. Energy studies about Russia are still mainly characterized by realist, neorealist and geopolitical theories and that of the liberal tradition. This study aims at exploring new ways to examine Russian energy policy by employing a constructivist approach. Traditional theories in IR utilized within this thematic area place value on structure as the main driver for state interest formation expressed for example in the energy policy of a certain country. Structures and consequently state interests are seen as constant and independent from human action. In contrast, this research will view international relations from a different perspective and emphasize the role of agency in the production of different objects observable in world politics, such as Russian energy policy or an elementary ingredient of it, the Russian energy strategy. In the construction of the social reality of international relations, agency is performed by different kinds of actors. The current research will analyse the influence of an epistemic community in the formation of Russian energy policy. The main objective of the study is to see whether the epistemic communities approach by Peter Haas (1990/1992) and others will increase our understanding of energy policy-making. Epistemic community and its influence will be identified by examining the policy project of the Energy Strategy of Russia up to the period 2030. The research will also contemplate the usability of the theoretical tool in examining energy issues in general. The research phenomenon will be approached from a qualitative perspective by analysing the research material with (qualitative) content analysis. The empirical material of this study consists of expert interviews. Additionally, online sources and Russian academic writing on the subject were used. The results of the thesis indicate that the energy epistemic community significantly influences policy processes related to energy in Russia. Its action takes place on two levels. At the cognitive level, the community produces the scientific rationale of the energy policy and future projections on where it is going. In practise the epistemic community mainly influences the development of policy tools, such as legal acts, federal programmes and economic incentives. The results highlight the importance of epistemic communities in energy policy-making. In Russia, the community serves an instrumental purpose in validating different policy options and in producing the institutional substance of the country's energy policy. In conclusion, the epistemic communities approach offers fruitful insights to research concentrating on the dynamics of energy policy formation both in national and international contexts. Asiasanat: Energy policy, Russia, epistemic community, constructivism

The challenges of climate change and energy security, along with problems of fuel poverty and energy justice bring imperatives to create transitions in energy demand. Academic research and theory have begun to highlight the ways that government policies, strategies, and processes across wide-ranging areas of policy, from health to work and the economy, shape everyday practices with significant implications for energy demand. This brings focus on the role of governance in shaping energy demand far beyond what might traditionally be characterised as 'energy' policy. Situating these ideas in terms of relational geographical concepts of governance, this paper analyses qualitative interview data with actors involved in governing along with documentary material, to highlight four different ways in which non-energy related governance can have important implications for energy issues. The central contribution of the paper is to set out a distinctive analytic framework for making visible 'non-energy' policy impacts, which might otherwise be obscured within analysis. The article concludes reflecting on the implications of the analysis for rethinking the governance of energy demand to meet contemporary challenges.

In 2022, the countries united by the concept of "the West" imposed unprecedented energy sanctions on Russia, thereby reacting to Moscow's special military operation in Ukraine launched in February. This article presents a comprehensive study aimed at identifying the essential motives of the "collective West's" energy policy. The first part of the paper gives an utilitarian vision of the problem in question. The author comes to the conclusion that, despite the U.S. shale revolution and the development of renewable energy sources, Western states, taken together, continue to depend heavily on oil and gas imports and, therefore, they are mostly driven in their energy policy by the need to neutralize the critical importance of hydrocarbons with a view to avoiding political and economic ramifications. The paper, in its second part, considers the Western energy policy at the tactical level where it can be either defensive or offensive as well as at the strategic level where the united West seeks mostly to effect energy transition. The article demonstrates that, from the perspective of international relations theory, the West's energy policy in its tactical and strategic dimensions fits most into the realist concept. Basic liberal imperatives define it as a relatively feeble one whereas constructivism is not able to identify its objective patterns. Additional theoretical footholds in understanding the West's motives in the field of energy supply are provided by the concepts of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism as well as by neo­Marxism. The latter sees the energy policy of the West through the prism of the struggle of states forming the "center", "periphery" and "semi­periphery" of the world.