Dr. Suwattana Kahintapongs

Dissertation Title: Energy Policy Reform: Thailand’s Electricity Supply Industry

This dissertation concerned energy policy reform in Thailand’s electricity supply industry. The thesis first looks at efforts to privatize Thailand’s electricity supply industry in order to demonstrate influential political and economic factors that drove various actors to reform the electricity sector. Both domestic and international actors played an important role in this process based upon their perceived political and economic benefits.

The thesis next considers why efforts to fully reform the electricity sector failed. Although privatization was partially successful in the power generation sector, it failed to materialize in the transmission and distribution sectors. Drawing upon different theoretical lenses, concerning democratic consolidation, interest group politics, and social movement hypotheses are built. Attention focuses on the influence that political instability and the strength of social movements had on the privatization implementation.