17 April 2009

GPPi presents on global energy governance at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC

GPPi Associate Director Jan Martin Witte gave a presentation entitled “Shifting the debate on energy security: The role of markets and rules in global energy governance” on 16 April 2009 at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. The luncheon discussion was jointly organized by the Center for European Studies and the International Policy Program of SAIS.

Current public policy debates on energy security are characterized by a narrow focus on questions regarding 'access' to resources and associated geopolitical and geo-economic challenges. This focus on the geopolitics of energy is rooted in the deep fears of consumers about security of supply, leading them to put strong pressure on policy-makers to come up with effective 'fixes'. However, this lopsided attention to the geopolitical dimension of energy security is based on the myopic and erroneous presumption that global energy politics is necessarily a zero-sum game in which one country's energy security is another's lack thereof.

In his presentation, Witte zoomed in on an alternative and complementary lens for analyzing contemporary global energy challenges, focusing in particular on the central role played by increasingly international (in the case of oil, thoroughly global) energy markets in balancing demand and supply; and second, and even more importantly, the significance of the 'rules of the game' - national as well as international - that structure these markets.

These 'rules of the game', that is to say the institutional architecture that underpins global energy, govern central aspects of financing, trading, and hedging oil and gas ventures via financial markets, investment treaties and trade agreements; and they address short-term supply risks in the event of market failure or disruption. In his presentation, Witte will show that it is imperative for policy-makers to broaden their perspective and assess whether and to what extent the existing institutional architecture of global energy needs to be reformed in response, first, to rapidly changing framework conditions, driven above all by the rise of new consumers such as China and India, and, second, to the growing relevance of state players in oil and gas markets.

For more information please contact Jan Martin Witte

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