Global governance for sustainable energy: The contribution of a global public goods approach

Achieving a sustainable energy future requires a revolution in the energy system. At the heart of such a transformation lies strong and coherent governance at all political levels, including the global level. While the need for global governance is taken for granted in a number of issue areas such as health, peacekeeping and environment, pursuit of global energy governance has been almost a taboo in political and foreign policy circles and has also had limited attention in the literature. In this paper, we explore how the viewing of a sustainable energy system as a global public good could serve as one approach to reducing the sensitivity towards global energy governance. The global public good concept together with the principle of subsidiarity is applied as a framework for understanding the role that the international community could play in, and the key ingredients for, global energy governance. Using two examples of international energy efficiency and renewable energy policy, we identify some types of international collaboration measures that would be both efficient and necessary to support a sustainable energy system.

► The need for global energy governance has been almost a taboo to discuss. ► We analyze a global sustainable energy system as a global public good. ► We use the subsidiarity principle to allocate global provision of global public goods. ► We use international energy efficiency and renewable energy policy as examples.