Virtual icon Advocacy Coalitions for Renewable Energy in Russia and Kazakhstan: The Emerging Role of Geopolitics

Abstract

This research examines and compares the emergence and evolution of advocacy coalitions for renewable energy (RE) development in the two largest post-Soviet oil and gas producers, Russia and Kazakhstan, where neither climate policy nor energy security served as initial drivers. The analysis, which builds on the conceptual toolbox of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), covers the time period from 2013, when the first RE support mechanisms were introduced in both countries, through 2024. Despite the many similarities between Russia’s and Kazakhstan’s deeply fossil-dependent economies, their RE development pathways have exhibited some marked differences. Russia’s support scheme is a compromise solution that has been shaped by the influence of domestic vested interests and has emphasized high local content requirements, even if it translated into higher costs and lower deployment rates. Overall, the RE sector in Russia has struggled to raise its profile and visibility, with preference given to other decarbonization pathways, such as nuclear power, hydropower, and the use of nature-based solutions for carbon sinks. Kazakhstan, on the contrary, has voiced support for renewables at the highest political level, seeking to attract foreign investment into the new sector and to use renewables to boost its international standing. In doing so, it has accepted a nearly total dependence on imported technologies as a tradeoff. The geopolitical changes of recent years – both in the area of the geopolitics of the global energy transformation and classical geopolitics as exemplified by Russia’s war in Ukraine – have introduced an additional level of complexity. In many cases, geopolitical changes have served as external shocks, affecting the composition of advocacy coalitions and their policy beliefs, but at times also opening new windows of opportunity for policy change. Drawing on 50+ semi-structured expert interviews, document analysis, and participant observation at sectoral events, this research seeks to identify and explain the differences and similarities in the RE pathways between the two countries by mapping and comparing RE advocacy coalitions, their policy beliefs and their use of coalition resources, as well as analyzing the role of geopolitically-driven external shocks as sources of policy change.