Support instruments for renewable energy development in developing countries: a comparative assessment in the framework of sustainable development and the Kyoto Protocol.

Summary This thesis aims to compare the effectiveness of standard instruments to support the development of renewable energies and of innovative instruments resulting from the Kyoto Protocol by taking into consideration: (i) the deregulation of network industries. (ii) and the emergence of new market forms resulting from multilateral environmental agreements. We test the trade-off between institutional approaches based on prices and those based on tradable quotas in industrialized countries before evaluating the possibilities of their transposition to developing countries. This exercise is undertaken on the basis of the evaluation of the economic, environmental and technological performances of each mechanism. We demonstrate the supremacy of price instruments within national frameworks and that of tradable allowances within the framework of a deregulated EU market. The extension of the evaluation to Developing Countries (DCs) leads us to integrate the progressive opening to competition of their electricity markets in parallel with the implementation of the flexibility instruments of the Kyoto Protocol. We mobilize the complementary theoretical contributions of the theory of contestable markets and neo-institutional economics. We then analyze the impact of different forms of deregulation on the development of renewable energy sectors on the basis of a global comparison including Bolivia, Thailand, India, Tunisia and Ghana. The empirical evaluation demonstrates the strong contribution of price support in the increase of installed capacities thanks to the adoption of the principle of Independent Power Production (IPP). It also highlights the low contribution of this instrument in the increase of renewable electricity supply and in the impetus of technological change in the sectors. The study of the transposition of the quota approach is carried out in the framework of the global carbon market and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). We demonstrate the important contribution of this mechanism to the development of renewable energy sources, thanks in particular to the possibility of double rents obtained by investors in the international carbon market and in national electricity markets. However, the requirements of sustainable development that its implementation implies will lead us to broaden the scope of the evaluation to ecological, social, spatial and governance sustainability criteria. We will then demonstrate, within the framework of a cost-effectiveness analysis, the strong capacity of the CDM to lower the costs of reducing emissions for industrialized countries, while highlighting: (i) the risks of reinforcing regional and sectoral disparities in terms of installed capacity (ii) and the risks of accentuating opportunistic behavior in the distribution of credits among economic agents.