Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since the 1990s, global adoption of renewable energy (RE) support policies has expanded substantially. Early on, liberal Western democracies took the lead in developing and adopting RE policies such as the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) and the feed-in tariff (FIT). The former policy has been widely used among U.S. states and mandates that a specified percentage of total electricity generated must come from renewable sources. The latter is common in Europe and provides RE producers with a guaranteed per-kWh payment designed to ensure that RE producers can recover their investment costs over time.

In the last decade or so, many developing countries have begun to adopt similar RE policies. Emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil have adopted RE policies not only to increase their electricity supply, but also as part of their participation in international environmental agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol. Lower-income countries such as Kenya, Uganda, and Ecuador have also enacted RE policies in recent years, often with the support and advice from European countries like Germany.

An extensive body of research has established the factors that lead to RE policy adoption in the U.S. and explored the patterns by which RE policies are disseminated across jurisdictions. Less is understood, however, about how RE policies are disseminated globally. Global RE policy diffusion might result from shared information and learning between neighboring countries within a region, or between countries with similar implementation contexts. Or it might occur through bilateral relationships between donors and developing countries, or via countries’ participation in international agreements to address environmental change.

In this paper, we use an original database of global RE policy adoption to empirically examine patterns of RE policy dissemination. Our dataset includes RE and FIT policy adoption in 165 countries from 1990 – 2015. We take a dyadic approach, modeling pairwise relationships between all countries in the dataset to test hypotheses about the conditions under which countries adopt similar policies, such as regional partnership, relative wealth levels, level of democratization, reliance on imported fossil fuels, or participation in international climate change agreements.