Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 21st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Public Policy Analysis Development Issues Author(s) Valentina Ivan Bucharest University of Economic Studies Bucharest Romania Title Is EU energy regulation a platform for policy learning? Implementation of third legislative package: The case of national energy regulators File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Valentina Ivan Abstract An increasing interest has been shown in the practical use of policy-making, namely how governments learn from one another or through the explicit co-ordination objectives of the EU or through requirements imposed by international donors. A recent theme is the influence of international organisations in imposing policies on countries. Countries are compelled by global financial institutions to introduce policy change in order to secure grants and loans, thus diminishing countries’ degrees of control over their policies. This leads to a domestic resistance to international instruments and a lack of enthusiasm in engaging in policy learning. The purpose of the paper is three fold. First, a major literature on concepts such as policy learning, policy transfer, policy diffusion and policy conversion has developed. The paper will emphasize that learning in public policy has been delineated in a wide variety of forms and will highlight the criticisms to the concept. The intricacy of differentiating the concept from the other notions is its main criticism considering the risk of confusion. While Dolowitz and Marsh (1996) suggest that all these concepts can be organised under a general framework, under the umbrella heading of policy transfer, the paper highlights that the terminological and conceptual diversity stems from different processes as there are some dissimilarities between the notions. Second, the paper will investigate what are the forces that induce political systems to learn rather than re-affirm the value of what they have been doing and why sometimes learning from abroad is difficult. The paper reviews the literature on barriers to learning and points out to path dependency and taking comfort in routine, risk aversion and exceptionalism as key factors that lead to reluctance to learning from abroad. Finally, it will provide an analytical framework for understanding policy learning in the EU context using quantitative and qualitative data from the energy sector. The paper plans to review the literature on the policy learning concept in order to adequately address the issue of overlapping. The literature review section will explore the coercive nature of policy learning with the aim to draw clear lines separating the operation of one mechanism from another. It is hypothesized that policy learning implies a rational decision by governments to emulate foreign institutions and practice to the extent that these measures produce more efficient and effective policy outcomes than the alternatives (Rose 1991). The assumption of rationality can be dismissed considering that learning takes place even through unconscious process. Scholars have investigated how conscious need learning to be for it to be considered ‘genuine’. Hall (1993) argues that “learning is a deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in the light of the consequences of past policy and new information”. This is different from Heclo’s (1974) view who suggests that “learning is a less conscious activity often occurring as a governmental response to some kind of societal or environmental stimulus”. The measure of comparative performance of energy sector in EU member countries will be employed to assess whether the decisions of energy regulators meet the prerequisites for good regulation imposed by EU and whether EU is a powerful platform for policy learning. Key decisions of energy regulators will be selected in order to assess whether the regulators’ policy is consistent or not with the best practices in legal and economic thinking.
