Media platformization has caused problems that a state cannot easily regulate. The media content regulations considered in Chapter 4 are prime examples demonstrating the need to alter the power distribution in the Internet ecosystem. In terms of speech platforms, the “rules-based” platform governance model led by the EU, such as the DSA, now represents a strong power in balancing the US’ CDA-based social media self-regulation. The years to come will be critical to the global governance of digital platforms. Key indicators include whether more and more countries will adopt DSA-like regulations along the EU regulatory path. In terms of streaming services, the content quotas for video streaming platforms may constitute performance requirements for investment in services. This measure may also violate the obligations that apply to the nondiscriminatory treatment of digital products. Looking ahead, cultural diversity concerns regarding avatars in the VR space will be even more complex and will propel the “trade v. culture” clash to another level. No matter how carefully crafted, media content regulation must face enforceable reality. Trade rules that ban local presence would enable platform companies to supply services without establishing a local presence, which could significantly constrain a state’s ability to enforce platform regulations.

Electricity decision-makers often choose to build wind and solar power for economic reasons. Renewable energy development may lead to economic growth, innovation in new sectors, and better employment options. This chapter examines which industrial policies states might choose to encourage these outcomes and whether Brazil and South Africa were successful in this. When private firms are involved – both countries chose private companies to build most of their electricity, through procurement auctions – it creates significant rents for the sector that must be managed to ensurecollective rather than narrow benefits. This chapter works within theoretical literatures on state–business relations. Brazil uses an initial local requirements stage and later public finance to encourage strong growth in wind power installation and manufacturing. The difficulty in developing a solar power industry accounts for its puzzling delay. In South Africa, similar coalitions as in Chapter 2 fight about whether the public or the private sector should produce renewable energy, pitting the powerful labor movement against the state’s industrial policies, in the absence of effective just transition policies.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

This chapter discusses the importance of the legal aspects of energy policy. It advances two main propositions: (a) different legal expressions of similar energy policies have different implications for the effectiveness and overall impact of a policy, and (b) the choice of legal expression is highly constrained by (i) law as a technology (i.e., the tools available to translate a policy into legal terms), (ii) the need to fit the policy within a broader legal framework and (iii) the underlying economic, social and political considerations affecting the choice of certain legal expressions. The chapter illustrates these two propositions by reference to three case studies relating to the extraction of shale gas in the EU, decarbonisation in the United States, and state support for renewable energy in India.