The Mediterranean Solar Plan through the Prism of External Governance

Through the prism of external governance, this paper investigates the emergence of the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP) as an external mode of sectoral governance and its actual capacity to cope with the regulatory gapproblem between the European Union (EU) and Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs). Although network forms of energy governance generally prevail in the EU and the Mediterranean region, the solar plan emerges as a very loosely institutionalized form of market governance in which political interaction and outcomes are the result of inter-MPCs competition over external funding. This paper shows that competitive pressure at best unleashes a reform dynamic in which individual MPCs undertake partial regulatory and institutional reforms in order to ‘lock in’ funding and longterm power purchase agreements. But, market governance under the Mediterranean Solar Plan is far to provoke a region-wide renewable energy transition. The discontinuity between the internal-external mode of energy governance and external governance under the Mediterranean Solar Plan is attributed to early choices of key member states (France and Germany) within the making of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) - facts that ultimately impacted on the resulting sectoral patterns of external governance, thus constraining the potential and limits of the Mediterranean Solar Plan to reduce the EU-MPCs regulatory gap