CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Sultana, Moshahida |
|---|---|
| Title | Energy Choices in Developing Countries: The Case of Bangladesh |
| Summary | Climate change mitigation requires the substitution of fossil fuels with low-carbon energy, while the emerging economies require rapidly expanding electricity supply. The current understanding of energy transitions in developing countries is fragmented across several disciplines and insufficient to inform policy choices. This thesis aims to advance the understanding of the mechanisms of energy transitions in developing countries, using Bangladesh as the main case study and integrating techno-economic, socio-technical, and political perspectives. The thesis uses a three-stage research design. The first stage traces technological and institutional path dependencies emerging over the fifty years of evolution of Bangladesh's energy systems. This longitudinal case study focuses on how energy policies responded to persistent “energy crises” and distills common patterns and salient institutional characteristics that structure Bangladesh’s energy choices. The second stage identifies energy transition mechanisms by examining the adoption of four energy technologies: low-carbon solar and nuclear power, as well as fossil-based LNG and coal power. The four technology cases address several paradoxes in which neither costs nor resource availability can account for the observed technology choices. The third stage is a comparative case study of Bangladesh and Vietnam to refine and validate the understanding of energy transition mechanisms through contrasting energy choices: solar in Vietnam and nuclear in Bangladesh. The thesis finds that socio-political mechanisms dominate techno-economic ones in energy transitions in Bangladesh. This contrasts with the widespread claim that declining costs of low-carbon technologies would immediately accelerate global adoption. It also questions a common policy prescription for liberalizing electricity markets and increasing electricity prices as a way to ensure the fast uptake of renewables. The thesis identifies institutional lock-in based on rent-seeking as the dominant energy transition mechanism in Bangladesh. This mechanism makes Bangladesh dependent on external resources and responsive to external pressures, thus amplifying the impact of geopolitically driven strategies on Bangladesh’s energy choices. At the same time, the institutional lock-in weakens the national innovation system, thus making the adoption of new technologies contingent on international private actors. These findings contribute to two debates in the literature. The first concerns the speed of adoption of granular vs. lumpy energy technologies. Granular technologies are often presumed to be simpler and diffuses faster. However, the thesis shows that lumpy technologies like nuclear, coal, and LNG may grow faster in institutionally locked-in and external resource dependent countries like Bangladesh under geopolitically motivated external pressures than granular technologies like solar, which require national capacity. The second question concerns the relative importance of global or national innovation systems in facilitating the diffusion of technology. The thesis identifies regional innovation systems as playing a more important role than global innovation system in the solar power adoption in both Vietnam and Bangladesh. More generally, the contribution of this thesis is a framework for the study of energy transitions in developing countries, with special attention to the international landscape, regional innovation systems, and institutional path dependence. It provides insights into developing countries' energy choices, which may explain their slow adoption of clean energy despite falling costs and the worldwide drive for decarbonization. Keywords: Energy Transition in Developing Countries, Path Dependence, Causal Mechanisms, Institutional Lock-in |
| Supervisor | Cherp, Aleh |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/sultana_moshahida.pdf |
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