Electricity industry reform in Australia : rationale, impacts, challenges

Fathollahzadeh Aghdam, R

Electricity industry reform in Australia : rationale, impacts, challenges

Fathollahzadeh Aghdam, R

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2006

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Fathollahzadeh Aghdam, R
dc.date.accessioned	2011-10-21T05:36:24Z
dc.date.accessioned	2012-12-15T03:53:20Z
dc.date.available	2011-10-21T05:36:24Z
dc.date.available	2012-12-15T03:53:20Z
dc.date.issued	2006
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/20323
dc.description	University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering.
dc.description.abstract	The Australian electricity industry has undergone significant reform in the past decade. The industry has been functionally unbundled into competitive and monopoly segments, several segments of the industry have been privatised and new regulatory arrangements have been developed. The outcome of this reform has been mixed. Overall, there appears to be a gap between expectations from reform and its actual outcomes. The discussion about the reasons behind this gap and how to narrow it, and indeed every aspect of reform (e.g., its rationale, ‘model’ of reform, methodologies for assessing impact of reform) has been carried out exclusively in the economic domain. This research has demonstrated that this (economic only) approach is rather limited. It has contributed to painting a rather positive picture of reform and has resulted in the adoption of policy measures that are unlikely to provide satisfactory redress for the challenges faced by the electricity industry. Such redress, this thesis has argued, could instead be provided by taking an institutional perspective on reform. This perspective views electricity reform as an institutional phenomenon, shaped by ever-changing cultural, social, and political belief systems. These belief systems, this research has shown, emerge from the interaction between humans, organisations, and institutions. The dynamics of this interaction has been analysed in this research in a problem-solving framework that employs a political economy approach. It was shown how humans, guided by motivation and cognition, created various electricity organisations that, through a chain of two-stage process of ‘tentative-solution-and-error-elimination’ (or ‘trial-and-error’), set into motion an organisational learning process that determined the final contours of the Australian electricity reform. This research also suggested how political economy approach could be effectively employed to re-define future directions for the Australian electricity reform program.	en
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)	en
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/20323/2/02Whole.pdf
dc.relation.replaces	http://hdl.handle.net/2100/1273
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.subject	Management.	en
dc.subject	Australia.	en
dc.subject	Electricity industry.	en
dc.title	Electricity industry reform in Australia : rationale, impacts, challenges	en
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access

Abstract:

The Australian electricity industry has undergone significant reform in the past decade. The industry has been functionally unbundled into competitive and monopoly segments, several segments of the industry have been privatised and new regulatory arrangements have been developed. The outcome of this reform has been mixed. Overall, there appears to be a gap between expectations from reform and its actual outcomes. The discussion about the reasons behind this gap and how to narrow it, and indeed every aspect of reform (e.g., its rationale, ‘model’ of reform, methodologies for assessing impact of reform) has been carried out exclusively in the economic domain. This research has demonstrated that this (economic only) approach is rather limited. It has contributed to painting a rather positive picture of reform and has resulted in the adoption of policy measures that are unlikely to provide satisfactory redress for the challenges faced by the electricity industry. Such redress, this thesis has argued, could instead be provided by taking an institutional perspective on reform. This perspective views electricity reform as an institutional phenomenon, shaped by ever-changing cultural, social, and political belief systems. These belief systems, this research has shown, emerge from the interaction between humans, organisations, and institutions. The dynamics of this interaction has been analysed in this research in a problem-solving framework that employs a political economy approach. It was shown how humans, guided by motivation and cognition, created various electricity organisations that, through a chain of two-stage process of ‘tentative-solution-and-error-elimination’ (or ‘trial-and-error’), set into motion an organisational learning process that determined the final contours of the Australian electricity reform. This research also suggested how political economy approach could be effectively employed to re-define future directions for the Australian electricity reform program.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/20323