Abstract
With climate change becoming one of the greatest challenges of the new century, clean sources of energy that have a much lower environmental impact are gaining increasing importance in global discourse. Major economies of the world like the United States and China compete for dominance over clean energy technologies, and European countries have also made great strides toward producing and using renewable sources of energy. Both clean and conventional energy sources play a crucial role in the economic development of regions that are endowed with either exhaustible or renewable energy sources. Energy and economic development are intricately linked and are an important topic to explore. This book focuses on energy-based economic development (EBED) and explains how energy “has become much more a driver of new paths to economic development rather than an enabler of growth.” With this distinction, the authors define and introduce EBED as an extension of disciplines of energy planning and economic development, as a domain that “seizes the opportunities inherent in clean energy development to drive innovation and generate economic growth,” and where this domain “embraces initiatives, programs, or policies that share the goals of economic development and energy.”
This book is organized into 10 chapters. The first chapter introduces the domain of EBED within the general context of energy development and economic development, while the concluding chapter of the book summarizes the main takeaways about EBED framework and presents the authors’ insights and considerations to advance the framework. The remaining chapters constitute the two main parts of the book. The contents of all chapters, with the exception of the concluding chapter and a short introductory chapter to part II, are well-referenced, and provide an extensive and useful list of literature relevant to the topic covered in the chapter—and in one case even provide an additional reading on the case studies. Each chapter starts with a concise and useful abstract.
Part I has four chapters and begins with chapter 2, in which the definition of EBED projects and common goals of these projects are provided within the energy policy and planning and economic development fields. The authors see EBED as a direct extension of these two foundational disciplines and place EBED goals on the converging realm of energy and economic development. The following chapter describes the process of designing, implementing, and evaluating an EBED initiative. The chapter proceeds by describing the different stakeholders involved, the data requirements, and a mechanism for evaluation. Chapter 4 is the longest chapter of the book and fruitfully describes seven supportive policy mechanisms that enable and accelerate, regulate the desired action, or have the potential to advance EBED activities. These policies include technological innovation policies, technological adoption policies, entrepreneurship policies, industrial growth policies, workforce development policies, climate and environmental policies, and planning. The last chapter of part I focuses on EBED evaluation and metrics. The chapter briefly touches on a set of metrics used in monitoring and evaluation, but more thoroughly discusses common practices of evaluation efforts as reflected in the peer-review literature. The chapter reports the findings of literature reviews under four main headings: outcome measures, type of initiative, methodological approaches, and timing and research design. The authors highlight the ways the findings from the literature may be beneficial for EBED and conclude the chapter by calling for an expansion of the existing knowledge base of evaluation research to include a wider set of metrics and methods.
The four chapters in part II deal with applications of EBED initiatives and are particularly oriented toward practitioners. Chapter 6 in four pages manages to shift the discussion toward practice, and sets the stage for the examples and case studies presented in the subsequent three chapters. The case studies intend to show how EBED works on the ground, how they incorporate energy and economic development goals, and how policies are used to support EBED initiatives. The case studies presented in chapters 7 to 9 respectively cover subnational “bottom-up” and national “top-down” EBED initiatives, as well as a hybrid “top-down” and “bottom-up” EBED approach based on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The subnational- and local-level case studies include EBED initiatives in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Copenhagen, Denmark; rural villages in Cambodia; villages in Rwanda; and Oregon and Pennsylvania, the United States. The national-level case studies include Singapore, China, Ethiopia, France, Laos, Morocco, and South Africa. All of these cases are reviewed by presenting a short snapshot in which the program is described, and the EBED framework, as described in the first half of the book, is applied to it. The case of the hybrid “top-down” and “bottom-up” EBED initiative based on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is treated more in-depth with more details about the program, its funding, how it operated, and findings to date.
The authors correctly identify EBED being among global complex problems that are multilayered, have economic, environmental, social, and political dimensions, and require multidisciplinary approaches. The book makes a good effort to cover conceptual, procedural, and practice of EBED at a diverse geographical scale at subnational and national levels, and ambitiously targets a wide array of audiences including researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. These goals may be too ambitious because as the authors are aware that, for example, environmental and intergenerational equity issues of exhaustible energy resources pose very different challenges than that of renewable resources. Furthermore, economies that are rich in energy resources spread geographically from the Arctic to the Tropics, fall within very diverse systems of economic structure—from market economies like the United States to more or less planned economies like China and the developing world—each having distinct sets of regulations and policies shaping energy production or use. At the onset, the authors refer to EBED as efforts that simultaneously pursue energy policy, planning, and economic development goals. The nature of EBED, which is the central core of the book’s topic, becomes blurred at the end when, in different parts of the book, EBED is fitfully referred to as a “framework,” “domain,” “initiative,” “activity,” “effort,” “project,” “program,” “strategy,” “approach,” “field,” and even “discipline.” Although many of these terms may be equivalent and justifiably used in different contexts, this imprecise characterization may confuse the reader.
This book is a timely and valuable contribution to fill a gap in the literature and help create a knowledge base in an increasingly important area. The book is well-researched and well-written, and provides ample references. The discussion of the policy environment and supportive policies for EBED is particularly noteworthy and informative, and would be of great interest for subnational-level policy makers and practitioners.