154 CHAPTER 10


their zeal. Now only three are there.”47 Interestingly, few of the respondents in Andhra Pradesh seemed to be aware of these electricity cooperatives. The national Ministry of Power emphasizes decentralization as an option for improving the electricity supply in rural areas. As a ministry representa- tive pointed out, the Electricity Act of 2003 makes special provisions for rural areas by deregulating local power generation and distribution. According to the interviewee, these provisions were made with a view to meeting the demand of agricultural producers, acknowledging that local generation can provide better-quality and more reliable power.48


Policy-Oriented Learning across Coalitions


Among the different stakeholder groups interviewed for this study, PMGER was the only coalition that engaged in joint action. This was the only group that would qualify as an advocacy coalition, as defined by Sabatier and Jenkins- Smith (1993; see Chapter 3). In their pure form, the two discourses differ on almost every aspect of electricity supply to agriculture, as the previous section clearly shows. Moreover, the debate about electricity supply to agriculture is clearly a case where core beliefs are in dispute—beliefs about the roles that the state and the market should play in economic policy. For this situation, Sabatier (1993, 27) formulates the following hypothesis: “On major contro- versies within a policy subsystem when core beliefs are in dispute, the lineup of allies and opponents tends to be rather stable over periods of a decade, or so.” The fact that no consensus has been reached on electricity pricing to agriculture for more than a decade seems to confirm this hypothesis. In this situation, policy learning across coalitions with different belief sys- tems is an important element of any strategy to overcome the impasse. There is evidence that, to the extent that change happened at all, policy learning was part of the process.


The most notable policy change in the two states studied here was the power-sector reform in Andhra Pradesh, which turned the state’s energy sec- tor into the best-performing in the country. As shown in the section “1989– 2004: Efforts to Reduce Electricity Subsidies and Reform the Power Sector” in Chapter 9, the launching of this reform involved considerable efforts to reach out to different stakeholder groups and inform them about the planned reform. Also, crucially, it involved negotiations between the government and the SEB on the one hand, and the organizations of the power-sector employees on the other. Far-reaching efforts were made to accommodate the material


47 Interview with NGO representative, March 9, 2006. 48 Interview with representative of the Ministry of Power, October 19, 2006.


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