New Environmental Policy Instruments in the Tradeoff between Energy and Environmental Sectors in Developing Countries

This article analyzes NEPI’s (New Environmental Policy Instruments) role in tackling the tradeoff between two different policy sectors – the energy sector and the environmental sector – in developing countries. This paper includes a brief introduction and it is structured in three parts. The first section takes an empirical approach to explain the tradeoff between energy and environmental sectors by analyzing official data. The second section, taking a neo–institutionalism stance, explores NEPI’s potential to reconcile the goals of ambivalent sectors by opening ways for alternative regulation mechanisms. This section, using a normative approach, explains the following concepts: New Environmental Policy Instruments, Innovation on governance, Multi-Level Perspective, and Strategic Niches Management Model. Lastly, the third section assumes that the implemented REDD+ projects have not yet considered widely alternative regulation mechanisms with compatible goals for the energy and environmental sectors. Therefore, it considers REDD+ as a NEPI to argue theoretically how institutions can advance towards synergies and symbiotic relationships among stakeholders and between policy sectors. This article concludes that in developing countries, private and public institutions could carry out alternative regulation mechanisms focused on the interdependence between innovation’s niches and governments.