Logan Richards Clark and Dr. Kirk Hawkins, Political Science Department

Energy often plays a central role in both domestic and international conflict. Many scholars, activists and policymakers agree that the environmental, economic, and political costs of the United States’ self-proclaimed “addiction” to oil for its use as transportation fuel, among other functions, are unsustainable, even dangerous. They assert that the industrialized world’s dependence on fossil fuels is perpetuating global warming, leading us to a world wide economic “peak-oil” shock, and setting up massive geopolitical struggles across the globe. If the global community is to avert the potential calamity that a continued dependence on unsustainable energy may incur, a wide-scale effort towards the development of alternative energies must be made. If the US and other countries ever hope to successfully diversify their energy consumption away from unsustainable sources, it is essential to determine what the required political conditions for alternative energy reform are.

The purpose of my study was to determine the necessary conditions for such reform by performing two case studies of countries whose energy policy reform outcome differed significantly, seeking to identify the economic, political, and technological factors responsible for one country’s success and another country’s failure.

Borrowing from the most seminal Political Science literature on the subject of government reform, I first devised a theory that would inform the methodology of my case studies. Specifically, using the theoretical framework devised by Heller, Keefer and McCubbins, I broke down the reform process into three stages or factors: The first has to do with the reasons why or why not a country’s leadership would deem such reform desirable, the second pertains to the country’s technical capacity to implement the reform, and the third to the feasibility of such reform given the country’s legislative process. I then selected the interview subjects for my study (and the questions I would ask them) with these three points in mind:

1. Did the country experience any domestic economic crisis, international geopolitical pressures, environmental concerns that provided sufficient incentive to alter the energy status quo?
2. Did the country possess the natural resources and technology to cheaply manufacture, distribute and market an alternative fuel?
3. Given the country’s legislative process, was it politically feasible to pass such potentially divisive legislation?

With the help of generous university funding including an ORCA grant, and with the guidance of my advisor, Kirk Hawkins and several other faculty members, I was able to travel to Brazil to perform primary research on their alternative energy program. I interviewed many different individuals involved in the energy policy process in Brazil including leaders in the energy industry and related government agencies, agricultural interest groups, former legislators, and journalists. After analyzing the information I obtained from my interviews in Brazil, I was then able to travel to Washington, DC and interview their American counterparts. The final product of this research was my Honors thesis, which was published in August by the Honors Department and is now available in the Harold B. Lee Library.

My study succeeded in suggesting some interesting answers to my research questions. I concluded that in order for a country to succeed with as vast and ambitious an agenda as comprehensive alternative energy policy is, it must experience a confluence of (a) sufficient economic incentive wherein the macroeconomic costs of leaving the country’s energy matrix to the forces of the market to determine were extremely severe; (b) technological capility, meaning that the costs of producing, distributing and marketing an alternative were relatively low; and lastly (c) the political wherewithal to override any potential veto players within the government who represented interests averse to reform.

I did however experience several difficulties while conducting this research, many of them natural consequences of the subject and methodology I chose for this study. The contrast between the two cases made it relatively easy to illustrate the importance of these factors collectively, but the striking variation of the two cases also made it very difficult to control for any one important variable.

Furthermore, the qualitative nature of the study made it difficult to actually assign a weight to each factor individually. Given the fact that the topic of my research required that I conduct the analysis on the country level and the fact that few countries had endeavored to reform in such a comprehensive, top-down manner, I did not have enough data to perform a sophisticated quantitative analysis, the sort that could actually determine the relative importance of each factor vis-à-vis the others.

Consequently, however academically interesting my findings might be, the conclusions I was able to draw were too broad to have much application in the public policy community. What I unwittingly created was a paper that essentially would instruct an omnipotent being how to create the perfect storm that would ultimately produce the desired outcome.

Nevertheless, I am certain that if my research is carried further and more data is included in subsequent studies, it may yield practical implications for the policy community. Performing this research was an essential first step in the research path before narrowing the research down to a very practical, policy-oriented question. I conducted a “theory building” research project that necessarily precedes the “theory testing” project that yields the practical implications. Having surveyed the big picture, and sorted out the myriad of factors involved in this issue, I feel that I am in a much better picture to conduct a more specific practical policy-oriented study into any one of the general categories of variables identified in this study.