بازنگری اصلاحات برق: مورد برای یک رویکرد توسعه پایدار

Debates over reform and restructuring of the electricity sector worldwide are typically focused on technical and economic concerns. This paper argues for a wider perspective on electricity reforms, one that explicitly examines social and environmental outcomes. The paper shows how electricity reform in the developing world has been driven primarily by financial concerns. It then examines changes in the electricity sector in the context of larger globalization debates. This framing of the issue sets the stage for a discussion of the social and environmental considerations in electricity reform.

Over the course of the last decade, the conventional wisdom on the structure and operation of the electricity sector has gone through a dramatic transformation. In both industrialized and developing countries, the perception of electricity as a natural monopoly, best organized as a vertically integrated and often publicly-owned utility, has given way to a model based on competition and private ownership. This transformation is viewed as the logical outcome of technical and economic changes in the sector having to do with changes in scale economies and experimentation with new institutional forms. As a result, debate over electricity restructuring focuses on questions of implementation, such as regulatory reform, institutional design, and sequencing of privatization and sector unbundling (Bacon and Besant-Jones, 2001, Newbery and Green, 1996 and Joskow, 1998). In this article, I suggest that a closer look at how and why electricity reform has been undertaken, particularly in the developing world, argues for broadening the debate beyond the technical and economic concerns that are currently dominant. In particular, I suggest the need for more focused attention on the social and environmental implications of electricity reforms. The argument is organized around four sections. First, I illustrate how the initial state of the electricity sector, and hence the nature of the problem to be solved, differs greatly across the industrialized and developing world. In this section, I also summarize current thinking about electricity reform. Second, I suggest that considerations of finance and an ideological shift toward greater reliance on market mechanisms have been a major driver of electricity restructuring in the developing world. Third, I ague that framing electricity reform around the larger process of economic globalization suggests the need for explicit discussion of how it will serve the public interest, and suggest that the language of sustainable development is appropriate for this purpose. Finally, I examine whether and how electricity reform has implications for broader social and environmental agendas.

Electricity sector reform is symbolic of rapidly accelerating global integration. Discussions over the future of the electricity sector should not remain ignorant of this broader context for reform—dependence on private capital, growing economic integration, and increasingly charged debates over the impacts of globalization on efforts at sustainable development. Of particular significance is whether current efforts at reforming electricity will automatically take into account public concerns, or whether social and environmental interests must be explicitly factored into reform processes. This paper has argued the latter, that market-led changes will not automatically ensure the public interest. Instead, electricity reforms should be based on careful consideration of not only economic and technical considerations, but also the likely social and environmental outcomes. To incorporate this perspective into ongoing reforms in electricity will require a considerable broadening of the debate, and solicitation of the expertise and involvement of those outside the sector. Academics and practitioners with experience in rural development, environmental protection, and social development are among those who could contribute to a more encompassing vision for the sector. The result may well be a more complex process of reform, but one that ultimately is reflective of the broader context within which the electricity sector is being restructured.