Aunphattanasilp Chumpho

Why did the Thai government that started the liberalization policy in the energy industry since 1987 decide to create the centralization policy in 2006–2008 and the re-nationalization policy in 2014–2017? Responding to this question by the actor framework is not enough to understand the politics of creating energy notions to facilitate policy transition. This study investigates the relationship between the creation of energy policy network and the framing of an energy agenda setting from 1987 to 2014 under the guidance of these two questions: who controlled the state energy agenda setting networks? How do they create an energy agenda to enable policy transition? This paper relies on content analysis by focusing on energy regulations and government reports to present the network construction and agenda setting. The results show that the Prime Minister office’s network and the Ministry of Energy network are the two key energy agenda setting networks. Sharing power between the government and the private sector, empowering the bureaucratic network for controlling the energy industry, and controlling the privatized energy companies and centralizing energy planning by the government are the three important sets of agenda. These conclusions provide an analytic model of energy politics for energy scarce countries.