Renewable energy governance challenges within a "puzzled" institutional map

Abstract

Environmental sustainability, a highly politicized issue, constitutes one component of global energy security. Awareness of mutual interdependence between global societies and their resources is supposed to facilitate the multilateral cooperation approach towards energy and climate issues. The transition to extensive renewable energy (RE) use, globally, is a key instrument for the passage towards a more sustainable energy system. The global energy governance's institutional architecture has been transformed in order to respond effectively to this goal. In particular governance has being enhanced with the formation of a series of institutions committed to promote the appropriate expertise for a regulatory and legislative framework for further expansion of RE technologies. This Chapter aims at the study of certain institutions in the establishment of RE governance principles. The Chapter indicates that RE international governance is time consuming and still lacks the necessary coherence, which is capable of compromising the public and private interests for the good implementation of RE at a global scale. The variety of the existing national and international institutions dealing with RE offers a fragmented rather a global approach of RE governance. This is further demonstrated by the insufficient RE integration at an EU level, despite the adoption of a very ambitious environmental regulation package. The analysis of the RE policy immaturity in the EU will be shaped, in this Chapter, around the analysis of the Directive 2009/28/EC and its weaknesses regarding the RE local implementation. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.