Background

Balancing the ‘energy trilemna’ by ensuring affordable, secure and sustainable energy access is one of the major global challenges of our times. As States are faced with the common challenge of fighting climate change while acting against energy poverty and fostering energy security, energy regulation can no longer be seen as a purely national matter. Although States remain sovereign over the design of their energy mix, the growth of cross-border energy trade and the need to cooperate to find solutions to decarbonise the economy has led to the internationalisation of energy activities.

However, the role of international law in responding to the global challenge of the energy trilemma remains under-studied. This is partly due to the fact that i) energy law tends to be exclusively assimilated to the law of oil and gas; and ii) energy activities challenge the international legal realm understood in its traditional sense, as they rely on a mix of instruments of different nature and normative weight, such as contractual arrangements and declarations of intentions. There is however a need to move the analysis of international energy instruments beyond the scope of lex petrolea  to better understand the role that the law can play in fostering the societal and economic changes needed to design decarbonised and efficient energy matrixes.

The Platform

The Platform brings together world leading universities and research centres active in the field of international energy law and policy. It aims to serve as a network of excellence that fosters the conduct of research in unexplored areas of international energy governance.

Strategic objectives

The objectives of the Platform are to:

1. Foster research in international energy law and policy: the Platform aims to become a network of excellence that attracts academics, including doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, interested in pursuing state of the art research on international energy governance. It seeks to create synergies between the different research projects undertaken by the members of the network with the view to fostering collaborations between them. A workshop, organised by the members of the Platform on a rotating basis, will be held annually to promote the exchange of ideas and encourage debates over topical and pressing issues of international energy governance. The publication, and dissemination, of research outputs will be encouraged by the creation of a joint working paper series.

2. Promote exchanges: in addition to encouraging cooperation between the member institutions, the Platform seeks to provide a base for external academic visitors and practitioners at different stages of their careers interested in visiting the member institutions to take advantage of their expertise and activities in the field of energy governance.

3. Facilitate data sharing: international energy law derives from a multiplicity of sources, including national, bilateral, regional, international and transnational agreements. This wealth of documents has a rich research potential but accessing and classifying them can be complex and time-consuming. The Platform will strive to make a number of these documents more readily available to researchers.

4. Advance education, by promoting the design of new courses in the field of international energy governance in leading universities; and by encouraging members to collaborate in the organisation of short courses, in Europe and world-wide, as well as in the design of online lectures.

Scope

The Platform understands ‘international energy governance’ in a broad sense, and welcomes the involvement of international, comparative and EU lawyers, as well as researchers in related disciplines – including political science, public policy and international relations – interested in international energy policy and regulation.

For more information about the Platform, contact Dr Duvic-Paoli, Project Leader, at leslie-anne.duvic-paoli (at) kcl.ac.uk

The work of the Platform is generously funded by the Philomathia Foundation.