Suchergebnisse

Im Gegensatz zur "klassischen" Entwicklung des Kapitalismus in West-Europa und den USA geht in den nach-kolonialen Gesellschaften der Dritten Welt die Verbreitung des Kapitalismus nicht mit der Herausbildung einer liberalen bürgerlichen Gesellschaft einher, sondern die Entwicklung des Kapitalismus resultiert in der Herausbildung eines militärbürokratischen Staates. (.)

It is no exaggeration to say that, within the mainstream of development thinking, the idea of creating markets through policy reform has increasingly been subsumed within the task of containing the risks of markets through 'good governance'. Such a focus on governance has also spread into the world of private and public investors and corporate financial institutions where the difficulties presented by protective trade and investment regimes are increasingly replaced with a concern for the risks posed by arbitrary authority, lack of clear regulatory frameworks and corruption.

Political-economy analysis has been a favourite instrument among donors of development aid since roughly the turn of the century. The usefulness of such forms of analysis has been emphasised because donors realised that their focus on formal aspects of the social and political organisation of countries caused them to overlook important elements of the 'political economy' of these countries. As a result of this, political and governance reform programmes, which had become part and parcel of the agenda of development under the Post-Washington Consensus, turned out to be much less effective than anticipated. The call for donor agencies to 'look behind the façade' of formal institutions in developing countries has thus come as part of the aid effectiveness agenda. It was argued that the effectiveness of development assistance policies would be enhanced if the realities of social and political power structures in developing countries were mapped and fed into the design of governance reforms targeting those countries. A more or less tacit assumption in this approach was that political-economy analysis would enable donors to identify potential pockets of resistance against the reforms that donors were advocating – hence improving the chances of getting reforms accepted.

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society's relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence ...