Breaking down renewable politics in the Global South

Plummeting solar and wind prices have generated a great deal of excitement in India’s energy markets. The argument has been unabashedly materialist: we have sunlight, wind and land, and should therefore be able to build large amounts of renewable energy. Kathryn Hochstetler’s new book Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa pries open the hidden political world of the transition. Through richly detailed case studies of the two countries, she tells the story of a desperate coal giant, astute bureaucrats, powerful industry lobbies, massive state corruption and hopeful industrial policy. The renewable transition is not just about silicon and steel, it is the very stuff of modern politics.

The most important feature of this book is that it focuses on two large countries in the Global South. It thus attempts to fill a perplexingly large lacuna in the climate governance literature; almost all future emissions will come from middle-income and developing countries. The book, Hochstetler points out, lets us get beyond commonly held assumptions about rich countries that do not always apply to the Global South, such as those about efficient bureaucracies or large amounts of state wealth. The book also helps us think about how late-developers will fare in the new race for renewable technology dominance in a highly competitive global supply chain.

The book’s core argument is that the amount of wind and solar power a country installs depends on the balance of pro- and anti-renewable politics in four ‘policy arenas’: climate change, green industrial policy (GIP), electricity distribution, and plant siting for renewables. Interest groups in state, business and civil society battle to build or block wind and solar power in each of these arenas, and sometimes cut across them to influence the politics of other arenas to assure themselves of victory.

Chapters two to five (of six in all) take up each of these arenas in turn. They describe very different political structures in the electricity sectors of Brazil and South Africa. The difference has to do with their radically different energy histories, which provides the methodological foundation of the book; Brazil has a low-carbon electricity sector dominated by hydropower while South Africa is heavily reliant on fossil fuels, resulting in fertile terrain for comparison. The book is largely based on Hochstetler’s field work in these countries, which spans a decade and 91 elite interviews.

These book throws up storylines that might be of immediate relevance to electricity policy observers in the Global South. In the climate arena, for example, South Africa’s nuclear-heavy low carbon plans are deeply influenced by corruption in President Zuma’s regime that included, among other things, a uranium mine owned by his son and a powerful state-owned utility with control over nuclear power. In the GIP arena, Brazil enthusiastically deploys all the tools of industrial policy from feed-in-tariffs to cheap finance, and eventually manages to develop manufacturing capacity considerably. In the distribution arena, South Africa’s history of apartheid draws attention to electricity access for historically underserved black communities, which solar and wind do not fill. Instead, large industrial users use opt out of the grid to further worsen equity outcomes. The siting arena is conceptually interesting but carries the weakest explanatory power; an original dataset shows that a quarter of Brazilian wind communities have contested wind installations but without substantial impacts on the sector.

Theoretical themes in each chapter build useful conceptual linkages between the state and the transition. Issues of state capacity feature in discussions on climate and industrial policy because they require the state to regulate without being captured by strong or growing interests. Later chapters move beyond state-business relations to discuss popular forces in renewable politics. Distribution systems are premised on electricity’s centrality in the modern compact between state and citizen while social movements around siting decisions are built on permissive institutional arrangements. The book manages to speak to academic and policy audiences without convoluting arguments.

One of the most useful, and exciting, aspects of this book is the work it does in demystifying ‘green spirals’. These are virtuous cycles, where green growth begets ever-widening coalitions of support for mitigation policy. Hochstetler locates these spirals at the intersection of the four political economies of this book. Powerful actors cut across and shape multiple policy arenas, thus building momentum behind the transition or amplifying inertia. South Africa will go down as the poster child of the negative spiral. Incipient climate action forces the vertically integrated, state-owned electricity giant Eskom to stifle low-carbon plans, block industrial policy that benefited fledgling private renewable interests, and mobilize rhetoric about the prohibitive consumer costs of renewables. One large actor shapes interests in three arenas. As renewable capacity addition stalled and disenchantment within the labour movement grew, they switched support from renewable to fossil fuel industries. Hochstetler usefully highlights the importance of just transition narratives in reconciling state-employed labour with a private-sector dominated green economy. There are lessons for India here. Brazil, on the other hand, might be enjoying the beginnings of a positive spiral due to moderately successful industrial policy. Several firms and thousands of employees are now vested in a transition.

One question that arises right through the book is how self-contained the electricity sector is. One would suspect that these four political economies in the electricity sector are being influenced by broader movements in national energy politics, particularly in transport, finance, and agriculture. As Hochstetler herself mentions on multiple occasions, Brazil’s major carbon contestations arise in agriculture and oil, but it comes out well when stood next to South Africa in the electricity realm. It is in reading national climate politics that this book falls short, but understandably so. The negotiation between methodological neatness and wider explanatory power is inevitably fraught in the multi-sectoral maze of climate governance.

As might already be clear, this book offers several useful policy insights to Indian readers. This is because so much of the policy language is the same in Brazil, India, and South Africa. In Brazil, for example, industrial policy increased costs and delayed the roll out of wind power but led to employment gains. The strategy also pits component manufacturers against contractors who would be better off importing cheap Chinese parts. These tensions are visible in Indian solar power today. Equally pertinent, though Brazil’s disciplined policies succeeded in building a manufacturing ecosystem for wind, it is stuck in a low-innovation, low-tech rut. The book strikes a sobering note here, pointing to the difficulties in emerging as a global leader in renewable manufacturing as a developing country. These are illustrative of the many conceptual trade-offs and policy insights, carefully argued and painstakingly researched, in this book.  

(Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa by Kathryn Hochstetler. Published by Cambridge University Press. INR 7,541 (hardcover).)

Environmentality is a collection of ideas, perspectives, and commentary by researchers at the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the authors. They do not represent institutional views.

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