Understanding policy change through bricolage: The case of Chile's renewable energy policy

Abstract

Chile is a country where path dependency made energy policy change extremely difficult by international standards. However, the country has recently become a renewable energy poster child thanks to a gradual process of policy change. How was this possible? This article contributes to discussions about policy change driven by ideas and to explaining the puzzling case of Chilean energy policy change. It does so by discussing the mechanism of bricolage—the recombination of old and new ideas by policy entrepreneurs—and its capacity to produce policy change in contexts of high path dependency. The article develops the political manifestations and consequences of bricolage and problematizes how actors continue to contest and change ideas' meaning after they have been institutionalized, a key question when analyzing processes of bricolage. The analysis is based on an array of data sources including interviews with key actors, newspaper notes, and legislative proceedings.

The Political Economy of Coal

“…Our research adds nuance to the work of Florez-Fernández (2020), who finds Chile's energy transition to be a passive revolution reflecting the maintenance of technocratic power relations. Rather, our research aligns with the findings of Allain and Madariaga (2020), who document how traditional energy objectives have been reenvisioned by typically subordinated actors to garner broad support in favor of decarbonization. Our work also leans on the analysis of Alvial-Palavicino and Opazo-Bunsterac (2018), who chronicled the development of Energy 2050, Chile's long-term energy plan, and found an emphasis on building legitimacy and consensus between government, industry, academia and NGOs.…”

“…The passage of the first NCRE law aimed to increase domestic energy production through a renewable portfolio standard. This first entry into renewable energy policymaking reflected an objective of energy security rather than decarbonization, allowing generators to pay a fee in lieu of compliance (Allain & Madariaga, 2020). Ultimately, the impact of this law on diversifying generation was limited until the auction reforms described in the "Power sector overview" section took place.…”

Broader outcomes in procurement policy – a case of New Zealand pragmatism

“…With some targeting, flexible implementation is retained that maintains agencies' abilities to innovate and pursue their own objectives in line with Government's ambitions. "Bricolage allows policy change within contexts of high status quo bias: where new ideas and actors cannot replace old onesas is the case with persuasion and policy learninga successful strategy to render ideas politically viable is to blend them with existing ones" (Allain and Madariaga, 2020).…”

“…Bricolage describes a way in which actors relate to their environments; organisation studies has used it for some time, and it has more recently appeared in public policy and political science (Duymedjian and Rüling, 2010;Allain and Madariaga, 2020). Bricolage is often related to organisational resilience where organisations take the form of "improvising systems" (Weick, 1998) and actors in these environments are characterised as bricoleurs (Duymedjian and Rüling, 2010).…”

“…Bricolage is thus not a transformational mechanism producing completely new policies, nor is it an adaptive or path-dependent mechanism conducive to policy continuityit is evolutionary in the sense that it changes certain elements while keeping others in place. New and old actors are attracted to the possibility of recombined ideas and policy orientations, that may also make new coalitions of relevant actors possible (Allain and Madariaga, 2020).…”