Electricity in the Mediterranean: Promoting good regulatory governance

ended

In the face of rising concerns for energy security and for climate change, huge investment projects about the production of renewable energies in the Southern Mediterranean area are under consideration. Regulatory reform and good governance of electricity markets, offering a stable and competition-based regulatory regime, are fundamental to inspire the trust of potential investors. However, their authoritarian political culture, political instability and developmental policies make Southern Mediterranean countries an unfavourable ground to the development of good regulatory governance. The RELMED project contributes to this conundrum by investigating the factors of Southern Mediterranean countries’ capacity to produce good regulatory governance. It does so by addressing three interrelated questions: 1) How can we explain the functioning of regulatory governance in Southern Mediterranean countries? 2) To what extent do these regulatory environments provide good regulatory governance? 3) What are the improvement opportunities? To offer precise answers to these complex questions, RELMED coins the innovative concepts of ‘regulatory eco-system’ and ‘good regulatory governance’ and develops sophisticated methodological techniques combining social network analysis and original indices to grasp multi-actor regulatory governance and its effectiveness. Empirically, the investigation will focus on three countries of high policy relevance and scientific value: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The RELMED project will 1) improve our theoretical grasp of the functioning and effectiveness of regulatory governance in the South, 2) bring new concepts for analysing regulatory governance with the notions of good regulatory governance and regulatory eco-system, 3) enrich our methodological toolbox for mapping multi-actor governance constellations and 4) provide much-needed empirical understanding and policy recommendations regarding electricity regulation in Mediterranean countries.