Organizing Energy Policy: Investigating the Spread and Integration of Energy Ministries

The pursuit of sustainable development seeks to achieve many different (e.g. economic, ecologic, and social) goals and, along the way, to avoid trade-offs between them. In energy policy, ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all (UN Sustainable Development Goal Nr. 7) 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. However, the concept of energy policy integration remains conceptually underdeveloped and still requires systematic empirical investigation. We seek to advance the state of research by concentrating on the existence and integration of national ministries responsible for energy governance. Specifically, we ask: Which countries have energy ministries in place? What kind of combinations of the energy portfolio with other sectors do exist and how have patterns of portfolio integration in this field changed over time? Finally, how can we explain the existence of energy ministries and their portfolio integration? One strand of literature understands such structural choices as a result of political manoeuvres, where executives seek to frame and reframe issues and signal their policy preferences. Another more functionalist strand emphasises the role of changing external contexts (e.g. economic, technological, social), which are pushing governments to adapt and to increase administrative efficiency. In this paper, we investigate these arguments while taking stock of the energy ministry landscape with a view to policy integration. Empirically, we analyse the existence and portfolio integration of energy ministries in 359 cabinets from 35 advanced democracies between 2000 and 2020. Our analysis relies on descriptive statistics as well as estimation of mixed effects logistic and multinomial logistic regression models. The results show a substantial increase in energy ministries over time and a wide variety of integration choices by different governments. Our regression results moreover suggest that the existence of energy ministries may be better explained by a functionalist perspective whereas ministry integration choices are more related to the policy preferences of governments. These results improve our understanding of the organizational landscape evolving around energy policy and open up discussions about how this may eventually affect policy outputs and outcomes in sustainability transitions.