What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The problem addressed in the RELMED project stems from the confrontation between Northern African countries’ acute need to reform their electricity sector and their political and societal characteristics that make this transition particularly difficult.
On the one hand, these countries face an urgent need to dramatically increase their production of electricity. Being developing countries, the demand for electricity rises very quickly every year. If they want to sustain their industrialization process and offer their population a good electricity service, they must find ways to build new power plants regularly so that their production of electricity matches the demand.
However, Northern African countries face particular difficulties for achieving this objective. Their limited budget implies that they need the intervention of foreign investors to build new power plants. Yet, attracting foreign investors requires the establishment of a transparent and market-based regulatory regime. This is particularly difficult for them to develop because of their autocratic and arbitrary political culture, developmental policies and need to buy out legitimacy from the population through subventions of electricity services.
The RELMED project examines how the different countries studied (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) address this particularly delicate and urgent challenge.
Why is it important for society?
First, the RELMED project helps these countries to address their electricity challenge. Looking at three neighbouring but very different countries, it identifies both successful practices and errors committed. This is very valuable information for all countries engaged in such reforms as it provides benchmark as well as positive and negative examples to get inspiration from (or to avoid).
The knowledge produced on the legal and regulatory landscape in the countries will also be very useful for potential investors, who need this information for evaluating the risks and opportunities of investing in the related countries. It shall thus facilitate the investment process, which shall help these countries to address their electricity challenge.
What are the overall objectives?
There are two types of objectives in the RELMED Project. First, it aims at helping Northern African countries to successfully address the challenge of electricity reform as explained in the preceding paragraph.
Besides, the RELMED project has scientific objectives. First, it contributes to the knowledge about the development of regulatory regimes in developing countries, a body of literature that has, so far, ignored the Northern African area. Second, by looking at the role of regulation in autocratic regimes, it opens a new research agenda within the field of studies on autocratic regimes.
