OECD - Policy Guidance for Investment in Clean Energy infrastructure
This document intends to inform policy makers on ways of enhancing investment in clean energy1 infrastructure, especially in developing and emerging economies. It focuses on the role that they can play in scaling up private sector investment and shifting it from conventional sources of energy to clean energy.
This report is a non-prescriptive tool that builds on several policy instruments developed by the OECD Investment Committee and the Environment Policy Committee over recent years.
In its structure and rationale, the Policy Guidance draws on the OECD Policy Framework for Investment (PFI), the most comprehensive multilaterally-backed instrument to date for improving investment conditions. Elaborated in 2006, the PFI addresses some 82 questions to governments in 10 policy areas to help them design and implement sound policy measures to create a truly attractive, robust and competitive environment for domestic and foreign investment. This report adopts a similar approach by providing policymakers with a set of issues to consider for strengthening their enabling environment for investment in the clean energy sector.
This report also builds on the OECD Investment Committee’s efforts aimed at enhancing private sector participation in infrastructure, including work developed in co-operation with other parts of the OECD. This is an area that has fostered important Committee work in recent years, most notably since the adoption of the OECD Principles for Private Sector Participation in Infrastructure in 2007. In 2009 the 24 Principles were tailored to the water sector by the Checklist for Public Action in the Water Sector, which developed practical guidance to help governments and other stakeholders assess and improve the framework conditions for private investment in water and sanitation infrastructure. Likewise, this document defines the main specificities of the clean energy sector that bear on the co-operation between the public and private sectors, identifies key policy issues for consideration by governments throughout the design and implementation of policy measures for clean energy investment, and draws on a wide range of available tools and practices from OECD countries and developing and emerging economies.
The Policy Guidance also draws on the recent paper Towards a Green Investment Policy Framework: the Case of Low-Carbon, Climate-Resilient Infrastructure, developed jointly with the Environment Policy Committee in 2012 (Corfee-Morlot et al., 2012). The latter provides a conceptual policy framework and examples of good practice for integrating domestic investment and climate change policies, so as to help catalyse investment in low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure across the board in developed and developing countries. Drawing on these elements and building on the structure of the PFI, this report focuses specifically on investment in clean energy infrastructure, and in particular with a view to addressing the needs of developing and emerging economies.
The OECD Declaration on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises (reviewed in 2011) also provides foundations for the recommendations of this Policy Guidance – in particular the Declaration’s provisions on national treatment and on international investment incentives and disincentives. Finally, in addition to the tools developed by the OECD Investment Committee, this document relies on instruments elaborated by other OECD Committees, including the Guidelines for Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises released by the Corporate Affairs Committee in 2005, and the Recommendations for Public Governance of Public-Private Partnerships adopted by the Public Governance Committee in 2012.