The transfer of renewable energy policy instruments from Europe to Southeast Asia : A case study of Thailand’s feed-in tariff policy

Sammanfattning: Climate change is one of the most challenging crises in sustainable development agenda. Tackling the problem requires the global transition towards renewable and sustainable energies. The uptake of these new technologies is often supported by policies and technological know-how that is developed by early adopters, and later spread and transferred to other places. Although renewable technology transfer and diffusion have long been studied, the question of how supporting policies flow from one country to another, and how they are adapted to the local contexts are merely investigated. This paper sheds some light on the process, mechanisms, and dynamics of policy transfer, and investigate the influences of national contextual characters on the adoption of policy from other countries, using Thailand's feed-in tariff policy as an example. The study applies an adapted version of ‘Dolowitz and Marsh model (1996, 2000, 2012)’ as the guiding policy transfer framework to analyse the information gathered through literature study and fieldwork, and to present the results and findings. The study discovers that policy transfer is not a straightforward process with a clear transfer timeline and boundary, but rather a dynamic and complex process that involves interactions with many factors, internal and external, and are continuously shaping the process and outcomes of the transfer. Moreover, the case study proves that Dolowitz and Marsh model is a useful and effective framework to understand and depict the process. However, if to treat policy transfer as an independent variable affecting the process outcomes, it would need to combine other frameworks, for instance, Marsh and McConnell Model (2010), to give an in-depth and comprehensive analysis to measure the success of policy transfer and policymaking.