Energy Policy Integration Through Ministerial Design

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 comprise 17 goals with a view to fighting poverty and to ensure that economic development does not come at the price of social and ecological goals; each of the 17 goals has specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years. SDG 7 is about ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. However, the attainment of this goal will not only depend on the adoption of appropriate measures in the energy domain, but also in other policy domains. Put differently, energy policy needs to become integrated into other sectoral policies such as environmental policy in order to achieve this goal. In the last few years, the comparative study of energy governance has grown in size and quality. Despite the recent advances in the literature, the concept of energy policy integration has received comparatively scarce attention. We consider this a limitation since energy policy integration is conceptually under-developed as well as requires systematic empirical investigation. We seek to advance the state of research by concentrating on the design of national ministries responsible for energy governance. Which countries have ministries in place that refer to ‘energy’ in their names? Which countries have ministries in place that combine ‘energy’ with other sectors and how has this changed over time? To address these research questions, this paper draws on original data for 50 advanced democracies for the period 2007-2017. Our findings show that over time ‘energy’ has increasingly become combined with other policy domains such as ‘climate’ and ‘environment’, which we consider to indicate a growing political commitment to energy policy integration.