The Role of the State and Actor Participation in Polycentric Governance: The Case of India's Renewable Energy Transitions

Abstract

An advanced exploration of polycentric climate governance is essential to achieve global mitigation goals. This study draws on social network analysis, surveys, and 86 qualitative interviews with policy actors in the Indian power sector. It investigates the role of the state in enabling or constraining actor participation versus the extent to which actors self-organise into belief-based coalitions to influence energy transition policy. By engaging with political economy frameworks, the paper furthers the literature on polycentric governance, unravelling actor interests and relationships. The results show that while India's power sector includes a diverse set of policy actors, they do not form coalitions based on shared policy beliefs. Rather, the central government plays a dominant role, influencing the extent to which different actors participate in the polycentric policy network. However, this central state apparatus itself is non-monolithic with uneven power dynamics across its various agencies and ministries. The Indian government pushed ambitious clean energy policies to encourage self-organisation between subnational government and private players. Civil society operates in a limited policy space, invited to participate to carry out the national energy transition policy agenda. The selective empowerment of actors by the central state has reshaped governance towards increased renewable energy adoption. However, the imbalanced participation of different actors may limit the potential for rapid and deep decarbonisation. Future work should study how an increasingly dominant private sector empowered by the state and a civil society that is nudged to the periphery impacts climate coalition building within polycentric networks.