Mexico’s road towards energy sustainability: The case of the recent electricity reform

In 2013, Mexico started the liberalisation of its electricity sector through a major reform that ended the state monopoly and created an electricity market. The 2015 Energy Transition Law (ETL) established clean energy obligations for big energy consumers as a way to introduce sustainability to the sector. Although the ETL seems to set an important precedent for Mexico’s transition to more sustainable energy, the law should be analysed in the wider context of an energy reform that has sought to make the fossil fuels sector more efficient.
This thesis focuses on the ETL and analyses the emergence of the Mexican electricity reform and its relationship with sustainable energy transitions (SETs). The thesis applies a framework that draws on elements from Socio technical-transitions (STT) studies and Historical Institutionalism (HI) to examine the Mexican electricity system, to determine how the political dynamics within the sector have affected its transformation over the last two decades. It tests analytical elements from STT and HI (three-level analysis, path dependence, power distribution and critical junctures) that have been used to explain SETs in other contexts. The thesis also adds other analytical elements that have not been included in the STT-HI framework, namely a detailed analysis of the policymaking process of reform and the role of policy entrepreneurs. The overall aim is to determine whether and to what extent the STT-HI combined framework could explain the dynamics of the Mexican case, which remains understudied in the literature.
The thesis highlights the need to examine a broader range of relationships and political processes affecting energy policies and sustainable transitions. The research contributes to SETs theories and is situated within an emerging subfield that seeks to conceptualise transitions as political phenomena. The analysis also provides empirical insights into the transitions literature beyond widely-studied European cases.