The Regulatory Anticommons of Green Infrastructures

Development of green infrastructures (renewable energy plants and transmission networks) is urgently needed if significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions are to be accomplished in the next few decades. But the huge financial investments required by these infrastructures will not be undertaken without a well designed regulatory framework. This paper argues that barriers to the implementation of such a framework can best be understood by drawing analogies to the Law and Economics literature on anticommons. Although situations of ownership anticommons (many owners with veto rights) and regulatory anticommons (many regulators with veto rights) display some differences from the point of view of the preferences and the coordination costs, it is submitted that this analytic framework can be employed to assess and criticize recent EU and US proposals which try to improve planning and siting procedures for cross-border green infrastructures. The literature on anticommons also suggests that effective remedies to suboptimal resource use are directly dependent on the design of the coordination mechanisms among all the regulatory levels.