Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is by far the most popular clean cooking fuel in rural India, but how rural households use it remains poorly understood. Using the 2014-2015 ACCESS survey with over 8,500 households from six energy-poor Indian states, we offer a broad but detailed survey of LPG use in rural India. We find that (i) fuel costs are a critical obstacle to widespread adoption, (ii) fuel stacking is the prevailing norm as few households stop using firewood when adopting LPG, and (iii) both users and non-users have highly positive views of LPG as a convenient and clean cooking fuel. These findings show that expanding LPG use offers great promise in rural India, but affordability prevents a complete transition from traditional biomass to clean cooking fuels.

Previous research emphasizes the importance of path dependence for sustainable energy transitions, but their strategic nature is frequently overlooked. We examine formally how exogenous shocks, such as changes in international energy prices, interact with positive reinforcement factors, such as the growing strength of the renewables advocacy coalition. We find that political competition modifies the effect of path dependence on policy and outcomes. Specifically, while "green" governments can use positive reinforcement mechanisms to lock in policy commitments (by creating green constituencies), "brown" governments strategically underprovide public support for renewable energy (to avoid creating green constituencies). The effect of positive reinforcement also decreases with international energy prices. Our empirical analysis shows that (1) political competition conditions the policy response to exogenous shocks and market failures, while (2) governments strategically exploit path dependence for political gain.

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The conventional wisdom emphasizes agency slack or bias as the central problem of international delegation. I show that the possibility of a unilateral influence contest is equally problematic. States can exert unilateral influence on autonomous international bureaucrats, either through rewards or through punishments, to pursue their particular interests. A costly contest results, so some states could refuse to delegate because they expect others to be too influential. The analysis has four counterintuitive empirical implications. First, international agreements often favor institutionally weak states that are disadvantaged in the unilateral influence contest. Second, states could limit the autonomy of an international organization even if this prompts bad policies. Third, a state can sometimes profitably exchange distributional concessions for autonomy. Finally, constraints on unilateral influence are possible only if a disadvantaged state can credibly commit to compensating an advantaged state for it. A central broader contribution of the analysis is to show how power politics influences the rational design of international institutions.

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