The study of renewable energy, long confined to engineering schools, became a topic of interest to political scientists in the early 2000s. This was probably driven by two factors: (1) renewable energy technology was on a path to becoming cost competitive, and (2) the Bush administration’s decision in 2001 not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol meant that technological innovations, such as clean energy, became even more important, given the weak prospects for international climate cooperation.
The first wave of research on the politics of renewable energy engaged in considerable effort to figure out how to break what Gregory Unruh (“Understanding Carbon Lock-In,” Energy Policy 28, no 12, 2000) famously called the “carbon lock-in.” Researchers paid particularly close attention to the role of domestic audiences and interest groups. This focus was unsurprising: voters’ preferences and lobbies appeared to be critical players in climate politics, especially given what people saw as the key factors behind George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto. It was thus plausible that the same would hold true in (renewable) energy politics.
Yet this focus on audiences and interest groups was (and still is) not entirely satisfactory when studying renewable energy politics cross-nationally. For one, it applies more naturally to settings in which these actors have an institutionalized and regulated access to power, such as in typical liberal democracies. Although policy makers are responsive to societal demands in autocracies and hybrid regimes as well, the mechanisms through which these interactions take place often differ considerably. Furthermore, bottom-up approaches tend to erase the agency of political elites. Understanding elites’ priorities becomes important precisely in cases in which we cannot substitute their preferences with those of voters or lobbies. In sum, our models may fit Denmark and Germany quite well, but they do not necessarily travel very far beyond them.
This, I believe, is one way to read Oksan Bayulgen’s excellent book on the “tepid” clean energy transition in Turkey. The book is organized around six chapters. After an introduction that summarizes the book and its contributions, chapter 2 discusses renewable energy policy and its history. It starts with a useful review of the design and types of policies needed for renewable energy infrastructure to emerge. It also offers a careful historical account of energy policy making in Turkey (pp. 48ff), helping set the stage for later chapters and familiarizing readers who might not yet be familiar with it.
Chapter 3 presents the theoretical model underpinning the book. Bayulgen begins by reviewing conventional models of energy politics that, by and large, focus on bottom-up, societal demands for (or against) green public goods. She then expresses doubts regarding the relevance of such models outside the set of wealthy, pluralistic Western democracies to which they are typically applied. A battle of interests and voters is helpful in understanding the path of Germany and the United States but will have limited explanatory power outside similar cases (pp. 75–76). Here is where Bayulgen makes her theoretical contribution: she suggests an alternative approach based on a state-led model of opportunistic political elites (pp. 77ff). This model takes elite agency seriously while acknowledging constraints imposed by institutions, such as the degree of concentration of power and the presence of veto players (pp. 90ff). The model is resolutely centered around ruling elites’ own preferences; nonstate actors matter insofar as they can contribute to the elite’s plans.
Chapters 4 and 5 build the empirical case in support of the book’s theory. Chapter 4 focuses on the first part of Turkey’s flirtation with renewable energy, a period that lasted from about 2001 to 2008. In the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis, the newly installed AKP government undertook a series of reforms that included the promotion of renewable energy. Bayulgen makes a compelling case that societal demands were not the key driver of these policies: “for the governing AKP elites the promotion of renewable energy was never the ultimate goal” (p. 107). Instead, the AKP’s desire and (institutionally enabled) ability to launch a pro-growth program to consolidate its power were key. Renewables were, one could say, a lucky side effect of this program.
This period of slow but real progress ended with the Great Recession of 2008, which is where chapter 5 starts. By then, the AKP controlled power more firmly. At the same time, bureaucratic capacity decreased (pp. 202ff). In this new constellation, the AKP government became freer to follow its “neoliberal developmentalist” project. Fossil fuels were a more advantageous means to fulfill this political plan, especially because they offered ways to generate patronage networks via low-skill jobs. As a result, the further development of renewable energy infrastructure stalled.
The last chapter both summarizes the book’s main contributions and ponders their implications. For instance, an important conclusion of this study is that, in contrast to the claims of several influential authors such as James Lovelock (p. 227), democracies may indeed have an advantage in the long-term politics of clean energy. More generally, it helps us make sense of, as the title describes it, the tepid growth many countries experienced over the last 10 to 20 years.
Overall, this book offers something to both researchers and instructors. From a scholarly perspective, it makes a compelling case that is deeply rooted in political economic models of policy making. It can also easily be integrated into the classroom because of its abundance of examples and concrete policy decision, while it avoids overly abstract theorizing.
Despite these strengths, there are areas where one may wish to push back. Some are fairly minor and caused by the passage of time. Fortunately, the notion that there is a dearth of research on non-Western renewable energy politics is no longer accurate. In fact, Bayulgen cites several counterexamples (fn 11, p. 234).
Perhaps more challenging is that the theory is rich in independent variables and relatively poor in outcomes. To be clear, parsimony for its own sake should not be a goal. However, one of the book’s purported contributions is to expand the set of countries that could be studied. Yet this would have been easier to achieve had the theory offered crisper statements and additional implications, perhaps by contrasting the politics of the power sector with areas such as transportation or cooking, thereby offering opportunities to evaluate the plausibility of competing models.
This should not distract from the fact that this book is a very valuable contribution to the literature. With it, Bayulgen contributes to an idea that has emerged from several directions in recent years: live by the political sword and die by the political sword. A favorable political constellation helped a new clean energy industry in Turkey to emerge from nothing. Yet the depoliticization of renewable energy is harder than expected, even in places where it scored early successes. How to complete the energy transition in rougher (political) terrain remains, undoubtedly, a critical question.
