Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has used small hydropower (SHP) to drive rural electrification and local economic development in the remote, resource-rich west of the country. More recently, however, this same technology has been re-framed as a renewable energy that generates electricity for the national green economy. In this paper, I argue that SHP represents a broader transformation of rural western China into a ‘low-carbon frontier’, characterized by the rapid growth of renewable energy infrastructure far from urban centers. I show how the frontier is simultaneously constructed as a site of ecological degradation and of untapped low-carbon value, both discursively and materially through preferential state policies for renewable energy. This, in turn, enables energy firms and local governments to extract profits from natural resources that may have competing uses. Drawing on policy analysis and interviews with government officials, hydropower investors, and farmers, I argue that SHP on the ‘low-carbon frontier’ privileges energy generation over other local resource needs, which has resulted in an indirect expansion of mineral extraction. This paper thus highlights the importance of examining subnational geographies of low-carbon transformation, and the ways that resources and technologies can be re-purposed for local and national development goals.

Democratic populism, expressed through a mixture of political-motivated subsidies, political interference in the collection of bills, and the political shielding of theft, has for decades compromised the ability of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to create a financially viable electrical sector, that provides reliable electricity to the public. This has provided the opening for small private businesses and social enterprises to set-up solar micro-grids to serve rural consumers in this poor and populous state. In this paper, I explore how these businesses lay claim to bringing needed new expertise and technical efficiency to electricity delivery, that is lacking from state providers. Increasingly, rural citizens in villages throughout Uttar Pradesh, historically deprived of regular electricity, are gaining the opportunity to buy electricity from these private businesses. This trend seems set to accelerate in the coming years. Yet the delivery of electricity, in a neutral and ‘non-political’ manner by private ‘experts’ also entails the public losing democratic influence over the terms of the delivery of this public good. I use the case of the electricity sector in Uttar Pradesh to argue for a more expansive focus on the democratic implications of small private businesses delivering public goods in India.

Based on a qualitative PhD study currently underway, this presentation explores how solar power businesses, incumbent electricity utilities and their respective industry organisations attempted to influence the introduction and development of Victoria’s solar power feed-in tariff policy. The study’s conceptual framework draws on the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions (Geels) and neo-Gramscian political economy (Newell). Documents were analysed to construct a chronology of Victorian feed-in tariff policy developments from 2006 – 2015. This chronology informed semi-structured interviews with over 30 key informants from solar power businesses, incumbent electricity utilities and their respective industry bodies. Participants discussed the way their organisations engaged directly and indirectly with policy makers. Interview transcripts were then coded and analysed. Preliminary findings suggest that larger (multi-national) solar power businesses worked with civil society to build public and political support for solar power feed in tariffs. They also suggest that incumbent electricity actors were willing and able to engage policy makers but a number of factors discouraged them from opposing feed-in tariffs fully. By combining the MLP with a neo-Gramscian political economy perspective, a greater and more nuanced understanding of power and politics in energy policy making is achieved, thus generating useful insights for strategic action.

This paper addresses the how and why of market creation and the role of the state in this (Birch and Siemiatycki 2016). In particular, how are market processes or forces applied to the provision of goods and services that were once firmly contained within the state and public sector. Through an analysis of attempts at introducing ‘cost-reflective’ network pricing in Victoria the paper finds that, despite privatization and unbundling, network pricing is a fundamentally state-influenced process. Cost-based pricing was embedded over time through crisis-driven rounds of state-led reform. But it was also disembedded through intense contestation by state and non-state actors working across different scales. Market logics of efficiency and cost-reflectivity are poorly manifest in the organizational forms of market governance. The incomplete and contradictory nature of marketization could have the following implications. On the one hand, a new frontier of marketization – fragmented grids with specialised user-pays offerings – ushered in by failures in the current model of economic regulation (Graham and Marvin 2001). Or, enduring state-protected universal service entitlements and resistance to geographically and temporally differentiated pricing from a variety of fractions of capital, resulting in future contradictions and new spatio-temporal fixes.