Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy Research & Social Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss Original research article Energy distribution trajectories in two Western Indian states: Comparative politics and sectoral dynamics Siddharth Sareen University of Bergen, Department of Geography, Fosswinckelsgate 6, 5007 Bergen, Norway ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Socio-technical transitions Electricity distribution sector Energy governance India ABSTRACT This article unpacks the institutional bottlenecks and path dependency holding back energy transition in two part-desert states with a sixth of India’s land, despite potentially high scope for solar growth and a systemic move towards a sustainable profile. As heavily-indebted electricity distribution companies in Rajasthan seek to emulate thriving counterparts in Gujarat and turn to technology adoption, efficiency enhancement and loss reduction measures, this study offers an in-depth stakeholder analysis, reflecting on implications for energy futures. Based on 56 expert interviews, it pries open the political economy of distribution within energy tran- sition in Western India, spanning concerns of various consumers and providing insights into the roles played by several institutions, from regulatory commissions to renewable energy agencies. The article adds to existing scholarship by explicating how institutional conditions promote and hold back transitions to sustainable energy futures, bookmarking stakeholders’ expectations with regard to current developments on tariffs, renewable energy growth targets and compliance, the advent of competition, and public participation. It contributes a comparative understanding of the current issues, concerns and ideologies that characterise this transforming sector at the state level, interweaving electricity distribution trajectories and regional political economic de- velopments to explain the dynamics of change and nature of resistance. 1. Introduction In the early 2000s, even an astute observer of power sector reforms in India might have struggled to identify many differences between the electricity distribution sector in Gujarat and Rajasthan. The cocktail of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation that characterised India’s approach to governance in the 1990s made its impact felt in most sectors of national importance, and the new millennium saw both the Rajasthan State Electricity Board (RSEB) and the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) preparing to unbundle their gargantuan selves into sepa- rate public utilities for generation, transmission and distribution. Guided by newly-established quasi-judicial independent regulatory authorities, each state set about formulating and implementing various efficiency measures in the distribution sector, which had long suffered from relative inattention, being side-lined within the black-box state electricity board structure. The past decade has shown that the early- and mid-2000s were crucial for the very different trajectories along which Gujarat and Rajasthan’s distribution sectors have developed: by 2015, Gujarat’s four public distribution utilities were the only ones in India to be consistently awarded A-plus credit ratings, whereas Rajasthan’s three public distribution utilities were being bailed out of over US$10 billion of debt by the state government. Numerous differences in the political economy of each state’s electricity distribu- tion sector help explain such contrasting financial performances, and unpacking them as issues of governance shows the bearing they have on many vital aspects of the sector’s trajectory going forward. Yet little regional scholarship exists to explain the institutional factors driving these contrasting developments. Combining a focus on the dynamics of transition and the bottlenecks that constitute resistance to change with an appreciation of how these are embedded within re- gional political economies, I argue that attention to context is critical for furthering our understanding of regional energy transitions, and demonstrate the particular factors that have proven key to determining sectoral trajectories in these cases. This article has a twin focus: the first part carves out key contemporary historical and institutional develop- ments in both states’ distribution sectors to set up a comparative con- text; the second part draws out the implications, divergent yet similar, that the current sectoral configuration has for a variety of concerns within both states’ future energy sectors, with very instructive overlaps. A picture of electricity distribution in Western India emerges, en- capsulating the enabling and constraining factors that inspire hope and despair for those intent on championing a transition to affordable, clean energy, and a fine-grained appreciation of what lies in the bargain for sectoral stakeholders. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.10.038 Received 27 February 2017; Received in revised form 14 October 2017; Accepted 20 October 2017 E-mail address: Siddharth.Sareen@uib.no. Energy Research & Social Science 35 (2018) 17–27 Available online 06 November 2017 2214-6296/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T