Renewable Energy in East Asia: Towards a New Developmentalism

Energy is crucial to the functioning of any human society and central to understanding East Asia's 'economic miracle'. The region's rapid development over the last few decades has been inherently energy-intensive and the impact on global energy security, climate change and the twenty-first-century global system generally is now very significant and will become more so over foreseeable years and decades to come.

The region is already the world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter, so establishing cleaner energy systems in East Asia is both a regional and global challenge, and renewable energy has a critically important part to play in meeting it. 

Governments play a critical role in promoting renewables and their contribution to tackling climate change and other environmental challenges. Christopher M. Dent argues this is particularly relevant to East Asia, where state capacity practice has been increasingly allied to ecological modernisation thinking to form what he calls 'new developmentalism', the principal foundation on which renewables have developed in the region as well as how East Asia's low carbon development is being generally promoted.

The Q&A will be moderated by Håvard Haarstad, Department of Geography, University of Bergen.

Christopher M. Dent is in Bergen to take part in a workshop organised as part of the World Universities Network projectDeveloping Compatible Energy and Climate Strategies.