Book Review Essay - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Book Review Essay

Energizing Comparative Environmental
Politics and Comparative Political
Economy
(cid:129)
Stacy D. VanDeveer

Hochstetler, Kathryn. 2021. Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power
in Brazil and South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nahm, Jonas. 2021. Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the Global Economy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Neville, Kate J. 2021. Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and
Fracking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Globally, the long, slow trickle of ﬁnancial capital and human resources moving
into more renewable energy sectors and projects for wind, solar, and biofuel
energy sources increasingly looks like a ﬂood. Talk of global and national
energy transitions is seemingly everywhere. But, of course, this is all
happening in parallel—and sometimes in competition—with continuing,
massive investments in additional oil and gas extraction. As their titles
suggest, the three books reviewed here are centrally about comparative and
global political economy. They are also “environmental politics” books,
although their intersections with global and comparative environmental
politics scholarship—and the roles played by actors and institutions
deploying explicitly environmental frames—differ quite a lot.

While comparative political economy has a longer tradition, the rapid
growth in systematically comparative research around energy and
environmental politics is more recent (Hancock and Allison 2021; Sowers
et al., forthcoming; Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012). The three books
reviewed here demonstrate the vast potential for the important, innovative,
and inﬂuential research that can result by bringing these three areas of
inquiry together. They illustrate and energize some positive trends in

Global Environmental Politics 22:1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00649
© 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

175

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

176 (cid:129) Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics

comparative energy, environmental, and political economy research. One book
develops a theoretical framework to study energy transitions via a comparison
of two middle-income countries in the Global South (Brazil and South Africa).
One outlines a framework to explain ﬁrms’ cross-border collaboration and the
substantial transnational and multinational innovation it induces in the
contemporary global market, even as national competitiveness discourses
reign supreme and distinct domestic political and economic institutions
shape patterns and collaboration and the resultant innovation. And one offers
a framework to explain why and how robust local resistance to energy projects
and development may or may not emerge in seemingly quite different settings.
Together, they also suggest that a long overdue critical reﬂection on the Global
North–Global South dichotomization of comparative research is under way.

Kathy Hochstetler’s Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar
Power in Brazil and South Africa demonstrates that theoretically and empirically
rich comparative energy, environmental, and political economy scholarship no
longer assumes that research about the Global South is framed as a “test” of
frameworks originally developed to explain something in the Global North.
The book asks questions like “What sources of energy do states prioritize?”
and “When and how do states intervene to support low carbon transitions?”
(7). To explore the answers to such questions, Hochstetler offers four political
economies of wind and solar power that occur around four areas of policy:
climate policy, industrial policy, social policy and service provision, and siting
policy. In each political economy, she explores conﬁgurations of interests,
coalitions, and institutions. She argues that outcomes of national energy
transitions “derive from the intersection of [the] four quite different policy
arenas” (15).

Her framework and the substantial body of empirical research in the
project are designed to explain the known, current outcome. In short, wind
and solar together account (in 2019) for less than 5 percent of electricity
supply in South Africa, whereas in Brazil, wind alone has grown to over 9
percent of electricity supplied in only a handful of years. Hochstetler sets out
to explain why and how these levels were achieved, as well as what limited
their growth. Along the way, her work convincingly argues a point most
comparative politics scholars would expect but many energy analysists (and
some global environmental politics researchers and advocates) tend to ignore,
namely, that the national-level politics of these transitions are likely to be quite
different due to differences in a host of domestic institutional contexts, interests,
and political and social coalitions.

Between the introductory and concluding chapters, the book is organized
into four chapters, each of which covers both Brazil and South Africa as it focuses
on one of Hochstetler’s policy areas or political economies. The discussion of the
climate policy domain demonstrates that both countries have robust climate
policy debates and advocates inside and outside of the state. But South Africa’s
coal-dominated electricity system produces coalitional and institutional

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Stacy D. VanDeveer

(cid:129) 177

impediments to any serious transition to wind and solar power. In Brazil, in
contrast, climate debate has paid little attention to wind and solar—with most
greenhouse gas emissions coming from deforestation—but the electricity sector
planners and operators have steadily increased their support for wind power. A
chapter on the industrial power domain explains that Brazil’s preference for
wind over solar energy is rooted in the belief that a domestic wind energy
manufacturing sector can and is being built (in contrast to solar).

Her analysis of social, economic, and distributional costs argues that
similar coalitions of anti–climate policy (and pro–fossil fuel) actors in South
Africa kept renewable wind and solar at bay when the prices were consistently
higher than coal-generated (and highly centralized) power. As prices have come
down, there has been more room for limited amounts of such power, and some
hope that communities still left off the grid might beneﬁt. In Brazil, falling
prices for wind and solar and the prospects for (and regulation changes to
support) more distributed power for both remote and urban communities
have added the growth of wind and solar in recent years. An examination of
siting reveals substantial controversy and contention in the Brazilian case
around wind, with much less related to solar. Community-based activism—
sometimes resistance—related to Hochstetler’s political economy of siting
offers opportunities to compare contentious Brazilian wind power siting and
costs with community resistance politics in Kate Neville’s book about fracking
and biofuels.

Hochstetler characterizes South African energy politics and multiple
political economies as highly contentious, whereas Brazil’s are often more
bureaucratic and managerial in nature. In both cases, she is convincing that
these countries do not have a single energy transition. Instead, these
transition politics play out across her four realms, and the result of these
multiple political economies is each country’s contemporary energy mix and
its progress, or lack thereof, toward a decarbonized electricity system.

Jonas Nahm’s Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New
Global Economy, like Hochstetler’s book, focuses on the wind and solar
industries. But in terms of his national cases and the rich transnational
dynamics of industry actors operating in national and global political
economies, his analytical focus is different. Nahm focuses our attention on
technological and economic aspects of innovation in three countries—
Germany, China, and the United States—convincingly arguing that there has
been and must be considerably more collaboration among private wind and
solar actors than is suggested by the endless rhetoric of national economic
and geopolitical global competition. He also reminds us that industrial policy
and mercantilist rhetoric are often deeply embedded in narratives about the
urgent needs for innovation and global cooperation to meet the unfolding set
of disasters we call climate change.

Collaborative Advantage opens with a vignette about one of Nahm’s visits,
during ﬁeldwork, to a solar photovoltaic ﬁrm in the suburbs of Shanghai that

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

178 (cid:129) Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics

illustrates some central arguments in his impressively researched and
convincing book. We learn that this ﬁrm is investing substantially in its own
R&D and innovating with impressive results. Its globally competitive solar
panels are destined for roofs in Europe and elsewhere. But Nahm also makes
clear that such ﬁrms are collaborating to solve problems and achieve
technological innovation via their partnerships with a diverse set of foreign
ﬁrms, including California start-ups and a German company founded nearly
150 years ago. Through such collaboration, innovations are achieved via
speciﬁc manufacturing equipment and expertise; newly developed individual
components of ﬁnal products; and jointly developed, commercially successful
technologies. In highly competitive global markets within and around solar
and wind energy technologies, we see some areas of local and national
specialization that would make David Ricardo proud, the spirited price and
product quality competition that capitalism’s most optimistic advocates so
often promise, and amazingly dynamic ﬁrm–ﬁrm and sectoral collaboration
among ﬁrms based in countries we are so often told are competing with each
to “win” the “race” to dominate new energy industries.

Nahm’s “collaborative advantage” concept describes “the creative process
through which ﬁrms insert themselves into globalized production systems” (4).
The term captures the continuing importance of specialization in the
contemporary global economy, even as it positions “collaboration as central
to the shaping of the international division of labor … [and] changes how
ﬁrms respond to the policies and institutions of the state” (7). Nahm
reminds us that states and scholars have been interested in technological and
economically beneﬁcial innovation for much of the post–World War II era.
Like national economic competition rhetoric, much innovation literature has
focused on or been framed around being an innovative nation or state. But
Collaborative Advantage convincingly demonstrates that contemporary global
integration and competition offer ﬁrms enormously important opportunities
to cooperate across borders. The fascinating entry point for comparative
political economy in Nahm’s research is his argument that much of this
collaboration reﬂects and reinforces national-level specialization—and that
this specialization has historically institutionalized roots. So, for example, the
United States much envied “start-up” culture (supported by particular public-
and private-sector institutions) helps position US start-ups as excellent global
partners in the highly globalized sectors. Meanwhile, German strength in
adaptable and specialized equipment design and manufacturing is also
reﬂected in its ﬁrms’ competitive positions as collaborative partners.

The book rests in part on Nahm’s extensive review and use of social
science literatures on innovation and industrial policy—and recent work on
green industrial policy. The result is a well-supported argument that shows
that national-scale industrial policy and existing areas of national economic
strength do not alone determine innovation within a country or national
economy. Rather, innovation processes and outcomes “from the lab to

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Stacy D. VanDeveer

(cid:129) 179

market” (47) now cross both national boundaries and the boundaries of the
collaborating ﬁrms. States and other actors may be singing mercantilist tunes
about the need for their countries to win races to dominate wind and solar
markets, but ﬁrms often collaborate across borders even as they compete with
ﬁrms in their own countries. Importantly, however, this does not lead Nahm to
make arguments about global and cross-national convergence. Rather, Nahm’s
analysis shows that cross-national differences in domestic institutions
persist—for example, around innovation and production systems, ﬁnancing,
and human resource training and education. This persistent divergence shapes
persistent specialization and opportunities for ﬁrm-to-ﬁrm cross-border
collaboration. The important place of industrial policy in both Hochstetler’s
and Nahm’s books offers both interesting points of comparison and a gentle
reminder to environmental politics researchers that a great deal of environ-
mental politics happens in spaces they too often ignore.

Collaborative Advantage concludes with a set of fascinating thoughts about
the implications of this work for industries emerging more recently, after
substantial reorganization of the global economy, and for older industries
(like the automobile sector). His country case chapters and the conclusion
also suggest some important policy implications for his three states, and for
many others. Frankly, I share his expressed concern that states and national
publics remain far more attached to national competitiveness rhetoric and
mercantilist policy initiatives than they are to the urgently needed global
energy transition—and that this poses a potential threat to that transition.
The global prices for wind and solar energy have fallen faster than most
expected, and these sectors have produced truly epic levels of innovation. If
the antiglobalization policy makers get their way in Europe, North America,
China, and elsewhere as they push for more mercantilist outcomes, should
we expect to achieve the global energy transition needed over the next
twenty-ﬁve to thirty years?

Kate Neville’s Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels
and Fracking is, like the other two, an excellent book. Its combination of work
rooted in political economy, comparative environmental politics, and social
mobilization—applied to local and regional cases in Kenya and Canada—
makes it a model for impressive and politically important social science
research. From its introduction to its conclusion, Neville’s monograph demon-
strates that innovative, insightful, and well-designed research can and should
be done across the North–South dichotomy, which too often inhibits more
comparative research than it facilitates.

Neville’s command of both political economy and mobilization
literatures is clear throughout the book, as is the value of her careful
ﬁeldwork in Kenya’s Tana Delta and Canada’s Yukon. Her conceptual and
theoretical framework is not simple, but it is clear. And her focus on political
contestation—or contention—as a result of the interaction of characteristics of
political economy and community identity is both extremely interesting and

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

180 (cid:129) Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics

deployable by future scholars in other cases. Especially notable is the
importance, in understanding and engendering particular kinds of resistant
mobilization, of community expectations that extraction from their
communities and meaningful places would primarily provide energy (and
proﬁt) for corporate actors and geographically distant communities. These
kinds of dynamics of global extraction from local places may well help us
better understand the growth in resistance around mineral mining, energy
extraction, and agricultural community production in thousands of com-
munities around the world—as the realization grows that myriad local costs
of extraction may well overshadow promised material beneﬁts. One is
hard-pressed to list a better synthesis of mobilization and political economy
literatures than that in her framework chapter, “Catalyzing Local Contention.”
Most of Neville’s substantial empirical material is focused on
controversies, contention, and resistance to biofuel projects in Kenya’s Tana
Delta and attempts to expand fracking in the Yukon. In both case areas—
across a host of local places and communities—she explores grievances,
disparate visions, and values and the intersections of national and global
political economy with local access and control of resources. All these factors
intersect with community identity, she argues. Clashes emerge at these
intersections, as do a host of connections with local debates about justice and
injustice.

Kate Neville is an exceptionally talented, evocative, and skilled writer. Not
only does she demonstrate her commitment to excellent, theoretically driven
empirical research throughout the book but, she communicates her passion
for the unique places about which she writes and her deeply felt and abiding
commitment to represent the voices of the peoples and communities in those
places. These commitments are not side notes. They connect directly to her
argument that identity matters if we are to understand how social and
political mobilizations interact with “classic” political economy factors like
ownership, ﬁnance, and trade.

Back in 2007, Hochstetler and Keck’s Greening Brazil was among a set of
important works that effectively challenged two oft-seen assumptions in a lot of
earlier environmental politics research: ﬁrst, that environmentalism or
environmental politics only comes to countries in the Global South from
abroad and, second, that environmental politics is usually some rather small
and siloed area of national politics and state–society relations. Greening Brazil
demonstrated that environmental politics can in fact shape and reshape
states, nations, societies, and the nature of national governance. While
Hochstetler’s new book on Brazil and South Africa also demonstrates that
such assumptions are false, its argument goes further. She demonstrates that
the comparative study of politics in the Global South can produce theoretical
frameworks that can be applied in and to many other contexts in the North and
the South. Hochstetler’s new book—indeed, her body of scholarship—shows us
all that what we mean by phrases like “comparative political economy,”

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Stacy D. VanDeveer

(cid:129) 181

“comparative environmental politics,” or “comparative energy politics” can and
should be determined as much by research in the Global South as it is by
research about the Global North. As she has recently written elsewhere, “we
impoverish our understanding of all the components of comparative
environmental politics—comparative, environmental and politics—when we
are too quick to narrow our sights to particular topics or a subset of states”
(Hochstetler, forthcoming).

Nahm’s and Neville’s works both chart paths toward well-theorized,
conceptualized, and empirically rich research that spans the aging North–South
dichotomy in comparative politics (environmental and otherwise). Although, of
course, we must continue to learn from research done exclusively in states and
societies in what we call the Global North and the Global South, all three of
these books demonstrate that such categories cannot be allowed to constrain
our theorizing, our empirical research design, or our intellectual imagination.

In terms of theoretical and conceptual frameworks, one would not call any
of these books “simple.” The literatures on which each author draws, and the
ways in which causal models are deployed and concepts are used, are complex,
contextualized, and innovative. Any students and scholars interested in energy
transitions, comparative environmental and energy politics, or comparative
political economy would do well to read these three books posthaste—
perhaps alongside Peter Newell’s (2021) Power Shift, to augment the excellent
comparative research with Newell’s global political economy focus.

Stacy D. VanDeveer is a professor of global governance and human security and
chair of the Department of Conﬂict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance in the John C. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global
Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research interests include
EU environmental and energy politics, global environmental policy making and
institutions, comparative environmental politics, connections between
environmental and security issues, and the global politics of resources and
consumption. In addition to authoring and coauthoring more than one
hundred articles, book chapters, working papers, and reports, he has coedited
or coauthored ten books, including Routledge Handbook of the Resource Nexus
(2018), The European Union and the Environment (2015), Waste, Want or War?
(2015), Transnational Climate Change Governance (2014), and Comparative
Environmental Politics (2012).

References

Hancock, Kathleen J., and Juliann Emmons Allison, editors. 2021. Oxford Handbook of
Energy Politics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093
/oxfordhb/9780190861360.001.0001

Hochstetler, Kathryn. Forthcoming. Environmental and Development: Crossing the
Divide Between Global South and Global North. In Oxford Handbook of

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

182 (cid:129) Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics

Comparative Environmental Politics, edited by Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer,
and Erika Weinthal. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hochstetler, Kathryn, and Margaret E. Keck. 2007. Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism
in State and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515
/9780822390596

Newell, Peter. 2021. Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017
/9781108966184

Sowers, Jeannie, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal, editors. Forthcoming. Oxford
Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.

Steinberg, Paul F., and Stacy D. VanDeveer, editors. 2012. Comparative Environmental

Politics: Theory, Practice and Prospects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
g
e
p
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

2
2
1
1
7
5
1
9
8
5
9
4
2
g
e
p
_
a
_
0
0
6
4
9
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Download pdf