interests without providing immediate large benefits to citizens. Moreover, the global diffusion of model reforms from the 1990s to 2000s was not accompanied by broad prior evidence on their efficiency impacts or the political feasibility of their implementation.

**Geopolitical factors have made policymakers more willing to pursue reforms despite risks and costs, especially in response to crisis.** The 1990s model became a norm ‘pulled’ by competition for foreign direct investment and trade, ‘pushed’ as a condition of development aid, especially by the World Bank. Aid appears to have been most influential for relatively discrete reform elements of establishing a regulator and privatization. These factors also help explain why model reforms spread in a wave-like pattern across clusters of countries, which can be described as mimicry. Contrary to expectations, there is no consistent correlation of model sector reforms with ruling party ideology. That is, reforms have occurred under both ‘left’- and ‘right’-leaning governments, though these categories hide complex politics in many countries.

**Regarding the implementation of reforms, this often involves a precarious balancing of competing public and private interests of various stakeholders.** This happens not just at the point of reform, but over time as actors learn to work with, around and against reforms. Achieving and maintaining a balance depends on dynamic and highly context-specific institutions and factors that go beyond the power sector. Incremental and inclusive processes involving various stakeholders may be better than ‘quick and stealthy’ reforms, which sidestep concerns of important actors. This is especially important given individual reform elements have distinct features. Regulators have to fulfil increasingly sophisticated functions for advanced levels of market reforms. This requires adequate resources and staff that may be a struggle for lower-income countries. IPPs create new channels for rent-seeking and political intervention, which in extreme cases can lead to unsustainable generation capacity expansion. Electricity pricing is particularly prone to political influence.

**In terms of outcomes, the technical impact of model reforms is ambiguous at a global level.** Reforms can improve sector performance in terms of economic efficiency and financial viability by some measures but not others. The positive impacts of reforms observed in Latin America are not so clear in other regions. For example, generation capacity does not correlate with reforms in Asian developing countries. Some global studies even find negative association of market reforms with investment and T&D losses. The impacts of reforms on pricing are particularly complex. Outcomes seem, rather, to be conditional on other sectoral factors, such as the quality of regulatory governance, and structural factors such as budgetary constraints and macroeconomic shocks.

**We also find that with concerted efforts and effective institutions, social benefits accompany model reforms and clean energy in particular needs a deeper rethink of the role of governments, markets and civil society in the sector.** Committed governments can attain high rates of access to electricity without model market-oriented reforms, but improved financial efficiency certainly helps. For instance, financially viable utilities are in a stronger position to invest in connecting new customers, but this does not automatically translate to access for the poor. Abuse of market power also disproportionately impacts the poor. There are weak links between model reforms and clean energy objectives, but the former could indirectly enable the latter through incentives for efficiency, fuel and technologies. The tendency is thus for conflict between equity concerns and sector efficiency unless actively mitigated, such as by measures to reduce the costs of electricity access for low-income households. Such tension is exacerbated by pricing structures which subsidize low-consumption or rural users. Scaling up clean energy requires policies and

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