June 24, 2021 10:00 - 11:30 AM EDT / 15:00 - 16:30 BST

For decades the development community has recognized the problem of poor energy governance, but approaches to improving it have been primarily technocratic. Recent work shows the importance of understanding the political economy of the energy sector when designing interventions and adapting our approach to managing energy sector projects. To tackle the climate crisis and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we need new approaches for improving access to modern, affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy.

In tandem with the release of a white paper and technical brief on this topic, we invite you to join us as leading practitioners explore hurdles to energy reform and put forward a new approach to the design and management of energy sector reform programs.

In Lebanon, the current crisis has exposed the fragility of Electricité de Zahlé (EDZ’s) model, which relies on both discounted power provided by Electricité de Lebanon (EDL) and subsidized diesel fuel imports to run EDZ’s own power plant, which are both now in short supply. In this policy brief, the team has estimated the savings from a medium-sized Solar PV plant of 63 MW in Zahle area, covering 20% of the demand currently supplied by diesel-based power generation. They also tackled the challenges facing the implementation of utility-scale renewables in Lebanon and what the Government should do to enable such investments in renewables and proceed forward.

We are delighted to let you know that The Policy Practice and ODI will run our next Political Economy Analysis in Action online training course from 6 September – 17 December. Please click here to register by 2 July. Our early bird offer expires on 30th May 2021.

Political economy analysis (PEA) is now recognised as essential to the design and adaptive management of development and foreign policy interventions. It is about understanding the contexts in which development and foreign policy happen, the incentives that determine how the relevant actors behave, and drawing well-grounded operational conclusions for policy, strategy, programme design and implementation.

This course will equip participants with the tools and the confidence to undertake a PEA, and to apply it to policy and programmes in a wide range of contexts. It will cover ten sessions over a 15-week period, requiring about 4 hours of study per week (with a mix of self-study, online Study Group discussions and tasks and webinars, supported by an inter-active platform).

On 4 February 2021, the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut (AUB), in collaboration with The Policy Practice (TPP) and the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) consortium, hosted a webinar entitled ‘Models for tackling Lebanon’s electricity crisis’. 

This briefing paper summarises the views of the key speakers and discussants. It draws together the key threads of the discussion – identifying the commonalities and the points of disagreement – and provides some tentative suggestions about the way forward for the sector.

Last week, we hosted the live launch webinars for our two online Political Economy Analysis in Action courses. One course has been specifically tailored for UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office staff. The other is our Open PEA course with a diverse cohort of participants from civil society, the private sector, bilateral and multilateral agencies.

We have revised our course material to reflect the wider set of objectives and interests in foreign policy as well as development interventions and we’ve updated our online PEA library .

We look forward to interacting with our 140+ course participants over the next four months.

If you or your colleagues are interested in participating in this course or a tailored one in the future, please email training@thepolicypractice.com to join our waiting list, or visit our training page for further details.

We are pleased to share a new publication by the World Resources Institute, authored by Jesse Worker and Niki Palmer (a TPP associate). This new guide takes a political economy lens and applies it to the extremely challenging area of domestic climate change governance. Just out and soon to be trialled in India, it hopes to inspires greater attention to the local constraints and enablers of climate action. 

TPP Director, Neil McCulloch moderated a webinar on “Model for tackling Lebanon’s electricity crisis”.  The webinar featured a range of experts discussing alternative approaches which might be adopted to improve the Lebanon’s highly inefficient and unreliable electricity system.  This included evidence from TPP’s recent paper on “From dysfunctional to functional corruption: the politics of reform in Lebanon’s electricity sector”.  Over 180 people registered for the webinar which was livestreamed on Facebook and is available from the Youtube channel of the American University of Beirut here.

The SOAS-University of London Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Programme, together with The Policy Practice, has published a new report entitled: From dysfunctional to functional corruption: the politics of reform in Lebanon’s electricity sector. The study explores how it has been possible to establish Electricité de Zahlé’s functional, but problematic, electricity service provision within the complex sectarian political context of Lebanon.

The World Bank’s 2019 report on Rethinking Power Sector Reform recognises that many of the key challenges in power sector reform result from the political economy of the sector.

Barnett and McCulloch state that the report is weak in four areas and make recommendation to the World Bank and other development partners on how these could be tackled.