Introduction to the <i>Special Issue</i> on energy regionalism

Academic interest in global energy politics increased drastically in the 1970s when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut oil production to punish the West, leading to escalating gasoline prices. The crisis highlighted that energy is inextricably linked to global politics, sparking the creation of a new disciplinary field: international political economy (IPE) (Hancock & Vivoda, 2014, p. 6). Scholars escalated their research. However, when the price of oil declined, so did publications, particularly in mainstream international relations (IR) journals; they remained stagnant for decades (Hughes & Lipscy, 2013). The paucity of energy politics publications became more obvious and problematic with dramatic changes in the global energy landscape including the rise of China and its massive consumption and production and Russia playing “pipeline politics;” major increases in renewable energy (RE) production and related political actors; oil and gas finds in Africa and Asia; hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) technology that led to the US becoming a net exporter in 2020, for the first time since at least 1949; new regional and global energy governance structures (e.g. the EU's Energy Union); new energy institutions, such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA); increasing certainty about climate change science and the 2015 Paris Agreement; the Fukushima disaster that changed views and policies about nuclear energy. This Special Issue's focus stems from four rarely linked trends. First, academic interest in regions and comparative regionalism, in which scholars rigorously compare formal and informal institutions, players, and processes for creating and maintaining regions, and issues between regions (Acharya, 2012; Balsiger & VanDeveer, 2012; Börzel & Risse, 2016; De Lombaerde et al., 2010; Hameiri, 2013). Second, a growing group of IR scholars turning their attention to energy. Third, IR scholars increasingly using lenses other than the traditional security one. Finally, a trend toward analyzing informal governance and non-state actors, along with formal institutions and state-led efforts. The scarcity of literature on energy regions is not just an “academic” problem. Understanding how regionalisms—players, processes, institutions, and organizations—intersect with energy is directly linked to domestic and international energy policies and outcomes. For example, regional energy infrastructure meant to improve standards of living in lower income states sometimes flourishes and other times fails disastrously. They sometimes benefit only elites, fueling corruption. Development goals may go unreached, and aid wasted, due to poor design and a weak or inaccurate understanding of regional dynamics. Energy projects can create negative externalities, in which energy production in one state negatively affects neighboring states. Exploring energy regionalisms promises to feed into both pertinent academic debates and broader international relations and domestic challenges. At the empirical level, starting in the late 1980s, there's been a “reinvigoration” of regional cooperation, especially in the global South (Kacowicz, 2018, p. 61) but in all world regions and across numerous issue areas (Schneider, 2017, figure 1, p. 230). This phenomenon is documented in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, which includes several issue areas not often covered, but not a chapter on energy. This absence was a catalyst for this Special Issue. Our goal is to highlight the critical importance of using a region lens to understand the politics of energy more fully as well as to explain and analyze a set of case studies that include energy regions in Central America, southern Africa, North America, Europe, Euro-Asia, and the East Mediterranean (East Med, hereafter). With this Special Issue, which includes suggestions for future research, we expect to accelerate this fruitful research agenda. The six articles that comprise this Special Issue are theoretically, conceptually, and analytically driven. Five of six papers include original empirical research on a specific region or two; the sixth analyzes definitions and concepts. All authors generalize their analysis and findings and seek to engage the larger literature on energy regionalism. In Energy Regionalisms in Theory and Practice, Johnson and VanDeveer note that regionalism has a long history in several fields, including IR, geography, economics, environmental governance, and imperialism (Johnson & VanDeveer, 2024). They observe that the long-developed concept of regionalism has only recently been applied to energy and suggest scholars working on energy can learn from the older, more developed regional environmental governance literature. Focusing on geography, IR, and comparative regionalism, they argue energy regionalism should include a range of scales, from local to international, and identify five promising nodes for research. IR frameworks serve as the platform for Goldthau, Richert, and Stetter in Leviathan Awakens: Gas Finds, Energy Governance, and the Emergence of the Eastern Mediterranean as a Geopolitical Region (Goldthau et al., 2024). They see market players as critical to energy regionalism. They argue that energy tends to be analyzed in terms of cooperation and conflict, through geopolitical and security prisms and that this lens overlooks how regions shape and are shaped by energy logics outside the traditional IR assumptions. They propose and apply the concept of energization, in which energy is the center of the regional formation, to the Leviathan gas find off Israel and how it has created a new region known as the East Med. In separate contributions, Palestini and Hancock explain the creation and structure of regional electricity systems—electricity plants, grids, and markets, collectively called power pools—in Central America and sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. In Orchestrating Regionalism: The Interamerican Development Bank and the Central American Electric System, Palestini finds the regional development bank (RDB) played the principal role in orchestrating this regional system and explains why RDBs in general should be given more attention in regional governance explanations (Palestini, 2024). He is optimistic that the Central American regional electricity system will produce the promised goals of greater regional energy security. In her empirical case of regional electricity markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Hancock's Electric regionalism: Path dependence, development and the African power pools highlights path dependence, through the role of colonialism and regional organizations created in the aftermath of African states gaining their independence (Hancock, 2024). Without the imperial powers of Europe advocating regions as the key to economic growth and security in Africa, the African states might not have created regional organizations. The logic of those regions, designed for one purpose (trade and other forms of cooperation) and then stretched for another (to energy markets)—what Hancock calls policy scaffolding—might be undermining Africa's goal of improving electricity access. Hancock also identifies mining companies, dominant regional states, and donor interests as key actors in creating and sustaining the regional power pools. In Cross-regional production chains, competitive regionalism, and the deepening of regulatory fault lines in Euro-Asia, Balmaceda and Westphal highlight the relationship between two overlapping regions (Balmaceda & Westphal, 2024). They focus on competitive regional integration, with Russia leading one region and the Europeans the other, and the role historical energy infrastructure—pipelines, electricity grids, etc.—plays in creating the regions. The competitiveness centers around their common neighborhood including Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. Following the comparative regionalism literature, they distinguish between regionalism and regionalization: the former refers to a bottom-up approach with non-governmental entities creating regions through their interaction, and the latter refers to top-down processes in which governments attempt to create a regional identity and institutions; they find that the two processes do not always align. In Comparative Energy Regionalism: North American and the European Energy Community, Herman and Ariel argue that energy tends to be analyzed in terms of cooperation and conflict which leaves out critical variations among regions (Herman & Ariel, 2024). They propose several ways to systematically compare regions, using three quantitative indicators that measure the depth of cooperation and four qualitative ones which assess the evolution of the region, energy wealth, actor diversity, and energy mix. To demonstrate their method, they analyze the European Energy Community (EnC) and North American regional energy governance and draw conclusions about how these two regions compare and what those differences mean for energy regionalism. The following sections elucidate key concepts and frameworks in the collection: definitions, subjects of analysis, players, energy security, governance, and path dependence. According to Johnson and VanDeveer, “Regions are constellations of meso-scale political, ecological, infrastructural, economic, and social relations that are neither exclusively local nor global in scale” (Johnson & VanDeveer, 2024). They draw primarily on scholars from the fields of IR and geography, two disciplines that have been most strongly focused on regions as analytical subjects. They note that while regions are often territorially contiguous, this is not always the case; they can be based on ecological constructs such as an ocean basin or be related to a cultural idea such as “the Arab world.” Regions can be at the substate level, either informally, such as New England in the United States, or institutionally and legally, such as the administrative zones in India, or a mix. They can be groupings of cities or towns, counties, or other administrative units. Regions are social constructs that may or may not be enshrined in law. The term energy regionalism was first used in 2015 to describe a regional renewable energy and energy efficiency organization in western Africa (Hancock, 2015).1 Following the IR focus from which Hancock draws, the empirical contributions in this Special Issue fall under a broad and generalizable definition: formal and informal institutions including organizations, structures, and rules that focus on energy issues, bringing together three or more states in the same world region, as defined by scholars or the states or substate actors themselves. Energy is defined to include the various purposes of energy (electricity, transportation, cooking, and heating and cooling), the various sources of energy (oil and natural gas, refined petroleum products, coal, nuclear, and RE (solar, wind, hydro, etc.)), and energy infrastructure (power plants, pipelines, ships transporting energy fuels, ports, liquefied natural gas terminals, electricity grids, etc.). We sometimes include bilateral relationships that are suggestive of regions or intended to become regions. For example, in North America, relationships are often between the United States and Canada, on the contrary, and the United States and Mexico, on the other. However, since they are often working within the context of North America broadly, these relationships can arguably be considered regional ones (Herman & Ariel, 2024). Furthermore, states often belong to more than one region—the Democratic Republic of Congo is formally part of both the Southern African Power Pool and the East African Power Pool (Hancock, 2024)—and regions can overlap (Balmaceda & Westphal, 2024). Although energy encompasses a wide range of resources, purposes, and infrastructure, Balmaceda demonstrates that IR scholars have tended to focus their research on oil, sometimes conflating fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal—into simply “oil” without regard for the physical differences between these fuels and thus missing important political ramifications (Balmaceda, 2018; Tutuncu, 2020). Even more problematic, scholars often use simply “energy,” combining sources and conflating purposes. Avoiding this pitfall, the Special Issue contributors define the type of energy and resource they cover. Nevertheless, the contributors collectively mirror the larger body of energy literature by leaning toward fossil fuels. None of the contributions makes renewable energy a primary focus. Two authors focus on regional electricity grids and markets, offering explanations for the creation of these systems (Hancock, 2024; Palestini, 2024). Two other articles include electricity as part of their analysis, albeit not the focus (Balmaceda & Westphal, 2024; Herman & Ariel, 2024). Before turning to the bevy of players, it is worth noting we collectively cover a variety of state types: authoritarian, democratic, and mixed; low-income, middle-income, and high-income; and market economies, state-run economies, and mixed economies. Commensurate with these varying income levels is energy access and consumption. Whereas residents in most regions have total or near total access to electricity, around 572 million Africans lack access; regional per capita consumption is 482 kWh (kilowatt hours). This compares with 2151 kWh in Latin America and the Caribbean, 6000 kWh in the European Union, and 13,253 kWh in North America (World Bank, 2022).2 The Special Issue authors collectively identify a range of key players in creating and maintaining energy regions, many of which come from IPE. Key non-state or quasi-state actors include development banks, investors, consumers, energy companies (fully or partially privately owned), mining companies, public-private partnerships, and national and transnational regulators. States also play key roles. For regionalism governance, these can be divided into regional states—those who are members of the region being analyzed– and extra-regional states—those who have interests in the region but are not considered part of the region. Regional members can be further divided into anchor states and other members. Another category of players is international and regional organizations. In the energy politics literature, the concept of security arises in several ways, some of which our Special Issue contributors engage, albeit often to say it is an insufficient framework. First, states sometimes seek energy independence in which energy needs are met exclusively through domestic production. In this way, the state insulates itself from outside disruptions. This is known as security of supply. Some states, however, may be concerned with security of demand: those who export energy want to ensure their product will remain in demand, thus bringing in critical export earnings (Jewell & Brutschin, 2021). Balmaceda and Westphal (2024) most clearly engage this concept of energy security. Second, scholars and practitioners have more recently added sustainability to the definition of energy security (Chester, 2010). Hancock discusses the power pools in this framing (Hancock, 2024). Third, security is introduced through the term securitization, in which issues can be seen through the lens of national security (Buzan et al., 1998). By securitizing an issue, policymakers elevate the issue above the market, making it paramount for the state. Goldthau et al. (2024) argue this is not the right framing, at least for their case. Fourth, energy can be seen through a conflict-cooperation lens with the question of whether energy regions create more conflict or can ameliorate conflict. These issues are addressed by Goldthau et al. (2024) and Balmaceda and Westphal (2024). Finally, energy security can relate to substate levels, including individuals, households, neighborhoods, and cities; this conceptualization often focuses on insecurity (Bridge et al., 2018, Chapter 8) and links with development goals. The two electricity regions’ contributions fit well in this category (Hancock, 2024; Palestini, 2024). The concept of governance takes us beyond the top-down hierarchical rulemaking we associate with states, to include non-state actors as well as formal and informal rulemaking. In general, there are three types of governance structures, each with a different relationship between member states (principals) and the delegation of decision making to a regional authority (the agent): intergovernmental, supranational, and plutocratic (Hancock, 2009). The energy regions with formal agreements covered in the Special Issue include all three forms of delegation relationships. The authors also cover informal governance and the many non-state actors involved. Path dependence, created by institutions and infrastructure, plays a role in several of the empirical cases. Hancock (2024) uses path dependence in her concept of policy scaffolding. Balmaceda and Westphal (2024) identify energy infrastructure created during the Cold War, such as oil and gas pipelines, as creating structures that facilitate non-state actor activities that conflict with political leaders' actions and pronouncements. Herman and Ariel (2024) assess the role of the NAFTA trade agreement in furthering energy regionalism in North America and contrast it with the EnC. Overall, this Special Issue serves to advance a growing research agenda and collective literature on energy regionalism while recommending avenues for empirical research and theory development. Scholars from a wide range of social science disciplines and sub-disciplines have roles to play, as do interdisciplinary studies that engage scientists and engineers who bring the technical expertise that will allow for more nuanced and sophisticated interpretations of energy issues. With the climate change crisis now soundly on the global agenda and many states' national agendas, regional energy governance, both formal and informal, and at a variety of scales can play a critical role. Kathleen J. 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