 I'm your chair for this session. My name is Laura Merrill from the Global Subsidies Initiative. The speakers and presenters are going to frame the issue through presenting their three papers. The first paper is about the process of fossil fuel subsidy reform. It's written by Sheila Whitley and Laurie Vanderberg of the ODI in the UK. The second is about the process of norm development around this issue. It's written by Tess Fandegraff and Mathieu Blondel of University in Belgium. The third is based on a survey of the realities and reasons behind reform in Trinidad and Tobago, and that's written by Michelle Scooby of the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Then we will hear from Discussant Martina Zarsano, if you'd like to join us here from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Before we present these papers, I want to say a big thank you to the SEI, the Stockholm Environment Institute, for phoning GSI up back in 2015 to ask what could be done on fossil fuel subsidies. Then, for bringing academics and policy advisers together as an emerging epistemic community and group of norm entrepreneurs, or some might prefer subsidy wonkers and for enabling us all to take stock of where we've got to over the last 10 years, both in terms of efforts on the ground with fossil fuel subsidy reforms at the deep level and at the national context in Indonesia, in Australia, in Trinidad and Tobago, in India, Colombia, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Taiwan and Bangladesh, but also in terms of how many organisations and people in this room have actually helped to establish this as an issue, both globally and at the national level in some of these countries and as we will hear. So, a big thank you to SEI. Can we give a big clap to SEI for being here? But I also want to take this short time and my privileged chair to say thank you to the Global Subsidies Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development and to the many talented individuals who've worked at the GSI and built it up over the last 10 years and I'm quoting here from a paper that we will hear from later today that actually analyses the role of the GSI and I quote, a small but well connected NGO that has had a disproportionate impact on the global efforts to reform fossil fuel subsidies and also I add a catalytic role in setting and supporting those political mechanisms in motions and I add it has been no mean feat and I also want to take this time very quickly to thank the many others that have also been on this journey from the start and the others that have joined along the way, the incredible research work from the OECD, the information research from IMF and the World Bank, the efforts and campaigns from OCI, the efforts from ODI, from SEI and from many others of you in the room, academics, policy advisors alike so thank you but here I'm going to add a note of caution and a reminder, many of us in the room are capable of drafting a solid literature review on this issue but that's not the same as working over many years to build capacity with universities, with CSOs, with government policy makers and departments, politicians, campaign groups, international organisations, bureaucrats and regulators to make this work on the ground and that means being in it for the long haul and this is a long haul. Indeed there was a time only a few years ago with such high oil prices that made consumer subsidy reform extremely difficult and for many and especially in our organisation it felt like we were banging our heads against a brick wall or Groundhog Day or a combination of both but with these low oil prices and with changes in political leadership there have come huge opportunities for change and some governments have taken them. The trick will be in maintaining these reforms when the prices go back up and this is going to also take a whole lot of time, perseverance, trust and capacity building to maintain this momentum and these reforms and to do it well but we should also take the time because we rarely do to step back and see what has been achieved over the last ten years with many tangible wins under our belts and I'm quoting from the paper that we're going to hear from today from Gent University, from Tess, that we will hear from in this session when I say this is not a trivial accomplishment. For this session and I hope throughout these discussions there are two ground rules first please stick to time I'm finishing soon which is ten minutes for each presenter and second to those who are asking questions or discussing the papers please if you're going to be critical and by all means be critical be constructive in your criticism but also take the opportunity to be also positive and reflective in your comments because although there is always more to be done and it could always be done better we have also come a long way already on this journey and we should reflect and recognise that also. Please let all the presenters present and the discussants discuss and then we will open this up to the floor so on that note I'd like to introduce Sheila Whitley of the ODI who will present on the paper entitled fossil fuel subsidy reform for rhetoric to reality. Use this mic or the handhook. This one? Yeah okay great. Hi I think Laura deserves a little bit of a round of applause for that. Thank you. So I'm going to present a paper which was actually a background paper to a larger paper from the new climate economy and I've heard even this morning at breakfast that we potentially don't need kind of environmental campaigners or climate campaigners on board with this fight or we kind of can take them as a given but a lot of my work has started actually kind of focused on that. How did we get the climate community talking about fossil fuel subsidies because I think they are more and more now but when I started working which wasn't that long ago maybe three years ago they weren't. It wasn't really a central part. You had one side event at COP usually small one on fossil fuel subsidies, subsidy reform and I came to work at the ODI four years ago on the topic of private climate finance so I was tasked with looking at how you can mobilise private investment towards positive action on climate and what I found quite quickly was that a lot of what governments were doing was mobilising money in the wrong direction let's say and I thought to myself well we should talk about this. Subsidies are something we should look at and fossil fuel subsidies in particular they seem very egregious and I had colleagues who told me and I think in light of Peter's presentation this morning it's quite interesting in the topic of today I was told it was too political. We cannot work on that. We work on climate change and we work on finance but it's too political and I would say that in the climate community and in the environmental community that is still what you will hear in many cases or people will not say that but what you'll get is a whole bunch of discussion around green finance where none of this is discussed and this really continues right now. I mean it's a very core part where you get a lot of these initiatives that I think are very welcome and really important because we have to be working on all fronts but where the incentive structures that are going in the wrong direction continuously are not discussed so I guess I want to put that at the front end because that was why we wrote this paper and in a lot of ways it was a literature review it was looking at a lot of the work that a lot of groups have done but the idea was to bring it together in one place so that those working on climate and particularly groups like the new climate economy who have these quite high level commissioners could start to have ex-government ministers and finance ministers etc who could make the arguments around this is important as part of the climate discussions and also that this is, there is enough evidence that this is possible so I just want to let you know that's the background for this report. Should I just use, yeah. So as I said it's a paper, it was a background paper for a larger paper that the new climate economy put out at the end of last year in advance of Paris so the new climate economy in 2014 gave these recommendations on better growth, better climate where there was one recommendation around fossil fuel subsidy reform the paper they put out last year was around will the how to and particularly the how to on international cooperation on subsidy reform so what the research that we did was to try to understand what evidence is there across a wide range of countries about how this is being done and in particular what's the role of international actors and channels in supporting that so the paper just briefly we did one paper at the global level and one paper looking specifically at subsidy reform in Sub-Saharan Africa my colleague Laurie who's sitting here is the co-author on this paper and it looked at the scope and scale of subsidies at the global level it outlined costs and benefits so costs of fossil fuel subsidies and benefits of their reform, current barriers and opportunities for reform and then more specifically it looked at key principles of subsidy reform and this question of international support so I'm just going to speak about the last two points so as I said what we did was using literature review and interviews a lot of this work was done by those groups that Laura highlighted around looking at cases of subsidy reform what we wanted to do was try to get a good geographical scope so the paper contains one page case studies on each of these 15 countries and we wanted a diversity of parts of the world country income groups, fossil fuel importers and exporters sectors affected so you often hear about fossil fuel subsidies but again the way you have this maybe tension now between fossil fuels you also have to recognise or I think a lot of us do that fossil fuel subsidies affect electricity, transport, heating, cooking, lighting the extractive sector and when you look at those different sectors or reform processes are obviously very different and then we also wanted to look at reform cases around both subsidies to producers and to consumers and obviously there's a lot more work that's been done around fossil fuel consumption subsidy reform so we have 13 cases of subsidy reform to consumption subsidies and only two for production so in terms of what came out of that work we have these principles of subsidy reform some of this has been written about in other publications but there's sort of these basic I guess may perhaps not basic but building blocks for subsidy reform so this idea that you need a whole of government approach so this is not about the energy ministry alone or the environment ministry alone this is about a whole number of ministries having to come together and I'll come to that again when I talk about this question of complementary measures which is what I'll focus on a bit in this presentation the deep need for research and analysis which I think is now starting to get quite sophisticated in terms of the work, the inventory work that the OECD and others are doing and the work that GSI and other institutions are doing at country level the need for consultation and communication mobilizing resources both of those things I think often you'll hear sort of the benefits of subsidy reform liberating kind of fiscal space but the challenge is you don't get subsidy reform you can't use those kind of resources that have been liberated to initiate subsidy reform so how are you going to get the resources you need to do all the ground work that's needed for subsidy reform that then maybe creates new fiscal space a lot of these and I'm going to get more into the kind of complementary measures as I said requires either creating new institutions or strengthening institutions and then what I think also came up this morning what we are calling complementary measures which often are new subsidies so new instruments to support different affected groups at the household and individual level or the sector and industry level and then this question of timing the idea that this shouldn't be done I mean at some times obviously each country has its own circumstances and in some cases there's a potential for rapid change if the ground work has been done well but often this idea of more careful timing and phasing in so I'm going to focus on this sub point which is around complementary measures because I think it's something that for us at least in our work came out quite strongly without support measures and use of resources for parallel subsidies or parallel initiatives this subsidy reform process appears to be almost impossible and that we really need to focus on kind of capacity and resourcing around the development of these complementary measures and this is often linked to completely different areas such as health, education, social protection groups who are working on issues that really have almost nothing to do with us in the climate community let alone us who are working on it on energy questions and that this development of complementary measures is really intricately linked to these other two points that I've put in green so this consultation and communication and mobilising resources so that you need resources to do this and that it also requires a lot of behaviour change campaigns and I think we'll hear in a lot of the case studies later today more details about how you do this communication how you do the consultation how do you mobilise resources so just in terms of the complementary measures and actually Peter raised a couple of these examples in his presentation this morning and I think these are often also interlinked so the idea we talk about kind of support in the paper we talk about support to sectors, industries and firms but obviously some of that support also is directed towards individuals and households but often in the case of production subsidy reforms you're thinking about this question of real changes in economic activity at a regional or national level so what is the government going to need to do to provide new support measures to the development of new sectors or to support existing sectors infrastructure development as Chris raised in his question earlier how do you make sure that if money is going to infrastructure development as part of this transition that it's not going to high carbon infrastructure support to individual businesses for restructuring looking at support to the development or adoption of alternative technologies and then areas where these start to overlap with individuals so as was mentioned earlier kind of worker counselling, retraining, relocation unemployment insurance, early retirement protection now if you look at all of that I mean what think about the ministry and the country that you work in or the part of government that would be responsible for this I mean it's a real diverse mix and if you're not working together with those groups to plan this over a long time frame it's subsidy reform becomes very challenging if not impossible some of the examples that we highlight in the paper are in the UK which actually did it quite late if you saw the strife that happened in the UK around coal mining and kind of end of support to coal mining it was actually not until the early 2000s that there was actually regional economic development support that was provided in the UK in Germany and Poland there has been kind of a more structured process where this was really linked where you have social assistance linked to the closure of coal mines I'm just going to show an example of a live discussion which is Hilary Clinton talking about how her as part of her presidential campaign well this was her primary campaign providing support to the Appalachian region in the US to move away from coal mining to develop economic diversification IT support for kind of linking in and wiring up the region to kind of explore to develop new economic activities and yeah it's a 30 billion plan it's not a small fry it doesn't come cheap and then in terms of households and individuals I mean again this is often discussed in the context of consumption subsidies but again these things are very interlinked regardless of the type of subsidy that needs to be reformed so in terms of the development of social safety nets social assistance programs cash transfers near cash transfers and I think we're going to hear more today from some examples of the India cases Indonesia case I would just mention a paper that Laurie has been working on another background paper which is on the links between subsidy reform and education finance and I don't know about the institutions that you work in but I think often we work I mean in the development space you often end up in silos and what's been amazing about this work is we're working within ODI across teams who are experts in education experts in international development assistance experts in social protection who don't think about fossil fuel subsidies ever but this project is really bringing together those different groups and I think this is part of the key is really how we make these linkages and I'll bring that up in the context of this how do you really look at international international support yep I'll try to be very quick I speak too quickly anyway so the three main areas that we talked about in the paper for international support are and I think this has come up also I mean we have all these numbers which are the right numbers which numbers should we be using so improving the availability of comparable information on energy subsidies not just fossil fuel subsidies this is really important and there's obviously a lot of international initiatives around this but we need I guess some level of harmonisation one question I have which maybe will come out in the discussions now that we have a G7 2025 deadline will we get criteria and some more consensus around what a subsidy is in terms of tracking what I want to talk about very quickly is this point about particularly technical and financial support for subsidy reform but with a focus on these complementary measures so how can international institutions really support that and then the widening and strengthening of country commitments we have this with I think we'll have maybe some discussion about the friends of subsidy, fossil fuel subsidy reform there are business groups that are now pushing for governments to take stronger commitments so just my last slide is on this technical and financial support focused on complementary measures and I guess to summarise this slide in sort of two points the first is this kind of how I came to this in the beginning which is that we really have to make sure that all the international support that exists now is shifting away from high carbon activities so that in and of itself will have a significant impact so it's getting international institutions international financial institutions to move away from supporting fossil fuels it's using climate finance and other channels to support subsidy reform there is really not enough support to governments with subsidy reform from international institutions and then lastly this the complementary measures and what we found and I would really be interested in what others think is that all these institutions are working already on health they're already working on education they're working on social protection so how do you get at the country level alignment of that support with a subsidy reform process so it doesn't actually require new resources it's using existing resources in a way that's timed with a reform process so you can make those public announcements about new initiatives and support measures but in a way that complements the changes in energy prices and subsidies so I think that's it The graph is from Ghent University in Belgium and he'll be presenting on fossil fuel subsidy reform and carbon divestment and international norm perspective Thank you chair so this is a paper co-written with Mathieu Blondel coleg at Ghent I must say at the outset it represents very much work in progress this is a very rough draft we've only just started working on this issue so these are some initial ideas that we're exploring but of course much more work needs to be done and so I invite your comments and suggestions for moving this thing forward looking at the whole program of this workshop I think our paper might add two things to the more general discussions one is we focus not just on fossil fuel subsidy reform but also on divestment because as I will argue later we see this as really two sides of the same coin that's one innovation another one is that we analyse these two movements if you want from the perspective of international norms there are a lot of papers who mention norms in passing who employ it as part of their analytical framework but we really want to dig deep into this issue see how other international norms have come about how they have thrived or been eroded over time and so we really want to see whether there's anything interesting in the literature on international norms that can be brought to bear on these two cases so a bit of background is part of a research project that has just been launched at Ghent University that we'll look at just how the question of how international norms emerge and how they get diffused in the international system and so the research project will look into two cases in particular fossil fuel subsidy reform and divestment why these two well very simple if you want to keep fossil fuels in the ground and move away from these energy sources to dry up the finance the financial flows that still goes to large extent to these sectors and that advantages still these sectors over others as you can see from this picture we know that figures might differ depending on how you measure things but the general picture is clear namely that fossil fuels still receive much more funding in terms of subsidies and investments compared to more green sustainable sectors and compared also to climate finance which is the blue bar so if you want to steer financial flows away you have to look at both subsidies and investments in some cases it's even difficult to make a distinction between is this a subsidy or is it an investment so that's also a case an argument for looking at them together and also we were struck by the fact that the divestment movement and the fossil fuel subsidy reform movement if you can call it a movement is to some extent still disconnected those two movements there's not a lot of interaction they refer to each other's causes by passing but there doesn't seem to be a synchronisation of activism of activities so we look at those two things from the perspective of international norms international norms are generally defined as standards of appropriate behaviour so they tell you how you should behave and the difference between norms and more legally binding rules is that norms are obeyed not necessarily because they are enforced they can be enforced some other norms have been enforced but because they are seen as legitimate so they contain a sense of oddness someone ought to behave in this way because other behaviours is illegitimate there are some examples of international norms protection of Wales territorial integrity this one anti-apartheid is worth mentioning because this was to some extent the inspiration for the divestment movement Bill McKibben who is one of the leading norm entrepreneurs behind the fossil fuel or carbon divestment movement even got advised by Bob Messi who was one of the big figures behind the apartheid divestment movement so that really served as an example another interesting thing is this the ban on land mines which was codified in an international convention in the late 1990s so there is an international ban on land mines and that grew out of a transnational campaign spurred on by NGOs like Handicap International and others so that could serve really as an example for the divestment movement and possibly also the fossil fuel subsidy reform movement in that they can at some point come to a global convention of some kind well how are norms diffused the most dominant model still is the life cycle model developed in the late 1990s by Finnamore and Sikink which is sort of a linear model of how norms emerged and are adopted by other actors in the international system so you have three stages the norms emerge then they pass a tipping point that's the point at which a critical mass of relevant actors adopt the norm after which the norm cascades through the international system and then in the final stage norms are internalized meaning that they get taken for granted character they are no longer a matter of public discussion they are accepted widely and broadly and norms sort of move through these stages spurred on by four mechanisms socialization which is persuading others that your cause is the right thing to do learning which is persuading others that it is the best thing to do that it is in your interest emulation or imitation which is doing like the others that's a sort of general pressure for conformity that we all are subject to and then finally coercion which means giving positive or negative incentives to adopt the norm so that's basically the standard model we chose to not to adopt it why because it's quite linear it seems like all norms pass from stage one to two then three but there is evidence that some norms succeed while others fail and also the model assumes that a norm is like a fixed thing that moves from one stage to the other whereas a norm can have different meanings to different actors and norms are not fixed entities they are subject to reinterpretation to contestation and so we borrowed a model that was developed in the context of multilateral arms control of how norms evolve and that development not just means that they emerge and diffuse but also that they can be contested that they sometimes are subject to backsliding and that model emphasizes three elements you have to have agency some entrepreneurs who push the thing forward you have to have an enabling context with a fancy word political opportunity structure and then you have to see you have to look at the contestation particularly the discursive contestation the frame contest that occurs with regard to the norm and then this is sort of the whole paper in one slide this is a preliminary mapping that we did of these three driving forces for each of the two emergent norms and I'm not going to go into details because that's not possible within the time slot but in any case it's worth mentioning that both norms were clearly pushed forward by specific norm entrepreneurs I would mention the Obama administration and the role of Larry Summers in particular in getting the G20 committing to phase out fossil fuel subsidy but of course the GSI and some other NGOs were also very helpful for divestment you have this think tank or NGO carbon tracker in London and of course climate activist Bill McKibben and his 350.org movement was very important I would say that in terms of the general external context subsidy reform has been helped more than divestment in the sense that of course we have the climate change crisis and ecological crisis we have the global financial crisis which was helpful in getting the subsidy pledge at the G20 agenda and we have now the fall in oil prices which is a very conducive environment to implement fossil fuel subsidy reform but for divestment we have of course the same issues but I would say that climate change as an ecological crisis is the most important one if you look for instance at the fall in oil prices that's sort of a privileged sort for the divestment movement of course due to the low oil prices investment is lower anyway but some investors might see the low prices as an opportunity to buy more stocks rather than to sell them so that's not really a wholly beneficial story for divestment and then we clearly see contestation in both cases a lot of it is just on some measures of definition what are subsidies but of course there are clear interests behind each of the definitions proposed for instance the IEA looks mostly at consumer subsidies and overlooks producer subsidies but it's of course an institution that has its primary mandate energy security and in that sense it might overlook production subsidies that might be understandable but in the case of divestment I would say there is more even more internal contestation because some would emphasize the business case for divestment while others would stress the moral case and even if you accept the moral case there is some contestation is it the right strategy with an active shareholder approach not be more efficient rather than to sell stocks and then let another investor some also say that divestment is a threat to clean coal and thereby also to efforts to curb carbon emissions that's the world coal association making that argument is quite far fetched in my opinion but still more importantly I think energy access again is also one of the concerns when it comes to divestment and then the intra fossil fuel competition should you focus on coal only natural gas one minute one slide excellent tentative conclusions if you compare the two norms it's clear that fossil fuel subsidy reform despite the early work by the GSI more or less trickle down on to the international system from above after the G20 pledge which if I read Nathan's paper correctly even took the GSI by surprise whereas divestment is more supported by a bottom up grassroots student led movement in some cases subsidy reform has been codified at international level quite substantially it has been endorsed at the G20 at APEC it's included in the SDGs whereas divestment has so far failed to obtain the same level of institutional support at a global level but nevertheless I think that in terms of norm diffusion obviously they're aimed at different audiences subsidy reform is primarily aimed at governments whereas divestment is aimed at wider public anyone who owns stocks even through pension funds it's often ordinary people with savings I think that fossil fuel subsidy reform displays an even pattern of implementation although there might be a trend of larger compliance we've seen whether that is sustained when oil prices if and when oil prices rebound whereas divestment I would say is making quite a big impact both in terms of changing the conversation at universities hospitals charity foundation there's also now a divestment movement at Kent University just recently launched so it's reaching deep into the public debate but at the same time it's changing I would say the financial conversation in Wall Street and London where investors are really trying to develop indicators for how vulnerable their assets are to climate change in general and I think that's not a trivial accomplishment as I indeed wrote in the paper thank you to our final presenter this is Michelle Scooby from the University of the West Indies and she will present on fossil fuel reform in Trinidad and Tobago climate change and environmental justice a SIDS perspective SIDS that's fine so that's small island developing states well thank you to the organisers for inviting me and this topic is very important from a global perspective and what this presentation offers is a look at what this means for an energy producer but a developing states that is faced with the global push to reduce fuel subsidies and as well with the development needs that are common in small island developing states so of course many people have spoken about this already so I'm not going to go too much into it but certainly fossil fuels have been subsidised they are heavy subsidies global subsidies for fossil fuels and the same is the reality in our country what I try to do is to figure out what makes the fossil fuels intractable so what are some of the issues with reform so you have the reformists and the poor subsidies basically the reformists would think that the subsidies are of course an inefficient mechanism to transfer resources to the poor it's a political tool a very useful political tool that's there and then it's environmentally unfriendly so those are three reasons why we want to remove the fuel subsidy and then of course those who are pro the subsidy continue to argue that it's justice and equity, it's environmental justice and equity to find a means to transfer national resources to the poor and it's a pro national development tool so it's not only the poor but it actually helps businesses to increase global competitivity etc so this is just a look at the subsidy claim values for my country over the last four years and the general subsidy has dropped the total subsidy has dropped quite substantially but we see that different parts of the subsidy have had different trajectories so super premium regular diesel kerosene, the different types of fuels that are used in the country very interesting minister of energy for information on the fuel subsidies and they gave me everything except the subsidies that are used for electricity because that's not quantified at all in the fuel subsidy so what makes subsidy reform difficult what framework can be used to explain interactability which is the case in my country and then what accounts for our trajectory so I asked many people including two former prime ministers several ministers of government several permanent secretaries and technocrats within the government different governments over a 15 year period these questions whether they considered the subsidy in our country to be transparent whether it benefited the poor whether government spending could be used more efficiently which were the sources of the pressure to remove the subsidy which were the most powerful arguments for keeping and removing the subsidy which were the most or least influential sources of pressure which were the most and least influential means used to exit pressure and then what conditions because it's not only the pressure but the pressure was quite linked to the conditions the economic conditions the global conditions so with the same amount of pressure but changing economic conditions it greatly changed the subsidy debate so I tried to create a little framework so I called it the subsidy intractability framework and there are three areas that everybody has spoken about already I looked at the power of agents and they are specifically focused on labour local business politicians and international financial institutions as four of the main let's say power agents that try to push the debate in one direction or another and then the question of contested norms and they are literally in contestation in conflict right now environmental stewardship, fiscal prudence justice and equity and sovereignty and finally the mechanisms for reform because even with the power of agents pushing for subsidy reform unless you have the mechanisms that make that reform possible for example the transparency of the subsidy many people are again changing the subsidy because they think it benefits the poor but if we have enough studies on it actually more of the subsidy benefits the wealthy than the poor so transparency is needed and then alternative poor measures which some of you have already spoken about so right so I don't think I'm going to go too much into the detail of the of the framework the normative debate and I wanted to look a bit at some of the mechanisms for reform I think the normative debate is quite clear you have the environmentalist to argue that subsidy reform is is needed to to create a low carbon trajectory and then you have of course the liberal institutionalist certainly in my region that argue that for effective governance you need to reduce the the impact of government on the economy in one of the ways to do this is to reduce the influence and subsidies but part that I wanted to look at as well is the mechanisms for reform and it was spoken about here a bit as well you know that long-term energy sector plan transparency on the cost of the subsidy and again that's one of the great challenges we have in my country we have producer subsidies and consumer subsidies governments invest quite a bit in encouraging companies to come in but that is not quantified even the people within the Ministry of Energy find it difficult to put their finger on the the actual cost of those subsidies and then with the consumer subsidies you have a variety we have the electricity subsidy which is not at all quantified as a subsidy as yet at least not by not in government fiscal accounting and then you have the subsidies on oil and gas so the subsidies on oil and gas go towards transportation fuels as well as for cooking etc so that's not very transparent and then targeted poor mechanisms infrastructure development is one way to show the people that the money from the subsidies is going somewhere else removing political control our energy companies are still state owned in large part and then obviously reducing production subsidies and the phase increase in fuel prices so again this is what the interactability in the case of Trinidad looks like so we see for example that LPG which is used for cooking has remained the same so that benefits the poor households quite a bit same with kerosene diesel has been falling but at a lower rate and we still have the subsidy on diesel whereas the subsidy on premium and super has all but been removed and premium and super use for luxury cars diesel is used for public transportation so the fuel on the subsidy on diesel will continue and the subsidies on the others will end in 2016 so I try to ask then I interviewed as I said people with in total they had about 110 years experience in direct political involvement with the fuel subsidy reform issue and I tried to find out from them where they thought the fuel subsidy would be going in the future and why it's intractable in some of the cases and I think in summary they found that the study found that equity best explained why or how the subsidy has changed because we have a subsidy that continues on electricity a subsidy that is falling on transport fuel for luxury cars so so the equity norms which is that the subsidy benefits the economic sector which is needed for the development of the country and the subsidy benefits the poor that is we have continued the argument that the subsidy is anti environment is useful for removing the subsidy on luxury vehicles for example so that's the balance that we've got so let's see where am I so I'm here looking at some of the local sources to keep the subsidy so here we see how relevant the voters are and the perception of the voters is that the subsidy benefits the poor and the majority of the population still continues to be in the low income bracket and this is one of the strongest forces that we have that government has in terms of how it approaches the policy and then I asked the same policy makers whether international, regional and local forces you know how relevant they will and here we see to my surprise that the local sources were the most influential although we are a small country with large international exposure international sources of subsidy reform are quite negligible and then I looked at the regional sources we are part of a regional economic grouping called CARICOM and right now there's actually quite a bit of conflict between Trinidad and Jamaica because Trinidad continues to have subsidized electricity whereas the Jamaican products are not given equal treatment but what I found there as well as the regional forces the subsidy reform were largely irrelevant much more so environmental groups and environmental organizations and then I looked at international organizations because in the literature they seem to be important in terms of providing norm change when it comes to subsidy reform and again what was found from this study is that the World Bank is marginally relevant whereas the WTO environmental groups UNFCCC were not considered as important in the reform analysis so then I looked at what were the main reasons for the states keeping the subsidy and political expediency and just as an equity with the two main things keep the party in power means not get the voters upset and also that our country is small with small economies of scale and producers etc need to have some sort of advantage to compete in the world economy and the subsidy on electricity for example would provide that or goodness okay so main arguments for the state for ending the subsidy economic reform because the subsidy is continually eating into government revenues so that's the main argument that they would use for ending the subsidy followed that it could be spent better on other things so when we looked earlier at some of those reform mechanisms and just to say that we've had a phased gradual increase in fuel subsidy prices but none of the other things have been yet implemented and here I show how the subsidy has changed so we see that it's been removed on private vehicles for the high income groups public transport it's been reduced there's no change on the electricity subsidy and the subsidies to producers have actually increased because we with falling oil revenues we try to increase incentives to promote oil exploration okay the conditions that have most influenced the subsidy reform so here I show that economic trends is perhaps one of the main triggers for the debate that's now opening on subsidy reform the fact that the government can no longer afford it so I used I tried to apply the framework to my country and the agents that are most influential are Labour and the local business community and those are the areas of the subsidy that have continued the contested norms environmental stewardship unfortunately has not been too relevant in the discussion fiscal prudence however has been and so it's just this inequity and finally the mechanisms for reform and I didn't really touch too much on this but the country already has a wide social net albeit not very well implemented for the government to say that they are changing a subsidy and providing x because there's education there's health etc so it was harder to show and that's one of the things that affects the possibility of removing the subsidy for low income groups in transport it was difficult to show that that money was going to be used for something else yeah from the University of Zurich, Switzerland will you discuss one paper and then you have to discuss no I think just do your discussion overall and then we'll open it up to the floor okay because it's really focused on the if you could just do the whole thing and then we'll open up to questions subsidy reform from rhetoric to reality and I think that report provides really useful summary and also kind of an update of previous overviews we have of what we know so far regarding what are fossil fuel subsidies what are the drivers and opportunities the key principles to follow when we undertake reform efforts on the national level and then especially opportunities to accelerate reforms to international support and what I found particularly valuable is that it also reminds us that fossil fuel subsidies are provided along the whole value chain from exploration to production and consumption and so we highlight that I mean problems of data quality set aside that there is a real proportion of subsidies which is not even accounted for in this country level estimates that are provided by the international energy agency or the ILO and what I have in mind is particularly what you also mentioned in other reports that additional reports for fuel extracting industries and infrastructure provided by donor countries and international finance I actually only read that paper you submitted here and not this larger background report which is and I was wondering are you going to publish this as the ODI report in the end so can we just go through the whole discussion and then we'll do the questions specifically at the end so I have a very few suggestions regarding the content but I don't know maybe it doesn't apply at all because you want to have a very short overview which is aimed at policy makers so I think probably hearing you okay is it not switched now let's choose this one so I think regarding fossil fuel subsidy reform I really like this valuable collection of case studies and that you also illustrated with numerous examples from different countries but one point that I think you could highlight more and which could be a complement to the section about the opportunities for reform and principles of reform is the difficulties of reform and how they are discussed in the political economy literature what I have in mind is that beyond identifying windows of opportunities we need more evidence on the motivations and political factors which drive subsidy provision in order to be able to understand the barriers to subsidy reform and how they could be overcome for instance and I think that's also was highlighted in the paper by Michelle is that oil production is really one of the most important driver of subsidies especially consumption subsidies and equally important there are scholars like Victor and Commander who emphasised the need to look at the factors which lie beyond demand and condition the willingness and the ability of governments to supply subsidies and they argue that governments sometimes just use subsidies because they lack other effective levels or institutional capacity to implement policy and these governments also have problems with credibility and capacity to reform and I think that's maybe one aspect you might want to add to this overview of difficulties to reform and in a general way I think that where you really add value with this paper is that you provide very specific practical suggestions for countries aiming to reform as well as international organisations supporting them for instance when you said that international organisations should template for standardised reporting of subsidies or that subsidy reform should be included in bilateral and multilateral trade agreements or that fuel subsidy reform should be incorporated in the mechanisms of the UNFCCC through NDCs or NAMAS and with support from climate finance and here I would be very interested to read more about this points where you add new ideas or things that are not discussed only recently and so I would like to read more explanations and current examples like very suggest measures I mean maybe you could provide some more detailed guidance at how this could be translated into action for instance if subsidy reform should be included in a bilateral trade agreement how this could be done so if this is to be a policy brief for policy makers then I think this very broad overview is perfectly fine however if the focus is more on adding recent discussed aspects you might set the focus on this very practical specific suggestions I have my comments not on paper but on the laptop for the last so in the meantime I can might say something about the paper on fossil fuel subsidy reform in Trinidad it was extremely interesting to me to read about this case study and I think it gives extremely valuable insights from a selected case especially because it comes from the context of fuel based economy and what I found particularly interesting is that you show that in the end it was really physical pressure and it came along with low oil prices and the resulting economic crisis which was by far the most important trigger of reform and I also liked how you documented the role of different stakeholders and how they are affected by different reform options and how these stakeholders are organised because this seems really to determine how in the end only prices for fuels used for private transport are regulated and not the other fuels and electricity and I also found it really interesting that you kind of confirm the statements in the literature that in this range year economies which are based on fossil fuels that there is really a sense of entitlement to rent from oil and gas production that the citizens have so they really think this rent it's a common resource and everyone should and the benefits from them should be distributed among all citizens and I'm really not into qualitative research methods however a few things came to my mind when I looked at your analysis and my main point here refers to the overall focus of the paper because I think you collected extremely valuable material to and it's detailed and well founded and you could really do like a straightforward political economy analysis for tuning that out of this material and I think you could even strengthen the argument by formulating a specific hypothesis on what you expect and why in the end it was exactly that only private private transport fuels were like there the prices were regulated and not for other fuels and then go ahead and test it however in your paper there seems to be like a second line of argument you refer to concepts like equity norms, environmental justice and this kind of suggests that the reform outcome in Trinity that can be partly or fully explained by the position of the country in the international climate negotiation process and this international debate about environmental justice and but in the paper I didn't find that much about you don't touch this very much and I also think that instead of equity norms one could also talk of industrial policy which is justifying the provision of subsidies in Trinity I'm not sure whether it's really necessary to frame subsidies that are used as a social policy and to support a domestic industry as motivated by equity norms especially in the international context I mean I see the social dimension totally but I don't see that link much okay then I might just turn to the last paper I think we should take a few questions and open this up to the floor now we'll take a few questions from people whilst you're finding oh you found it great go for it keep going then on the paper of fuel subsidy reform and carbon divestment as an international from an international norm perspective I I learned extremely much and I think you really provide an additional perspective to the energy governance debate and to the debate on fossil fuel subsidy reform in particular and I was really fascinated to see how actual progress in fuel subsidy reform was only kicked into high gear when after this norm reached a high level of institutionalisation as an international norm and you also show how this norm and ideas are important factors that we have to take into account in the future when we try to understand policy reforms and processes of change and the barriers to such changes I don't have to say much regarding the methodology I found it actually very convincing that you use this this new approach you presented along these three factors of agency, context and discourse and I think it helped you very well to explain just one very general question or suggestion I was wondering if you are not too much restraining yourself I mean you have a very very interesting analysis and I think you could even make a theoretical contribution with your paper based on all the observations you made I mean come up with a hypothesis with an inductive approach I mean a hypothesis in which you state that it is due to this and that key factors that some norms become broadly institutionalised and others do not one key difference I personally found quite interesting between the two norms was that few subsidies are I mean it's like public expenditures while investments are in most part private I mean of course there are pension funds and so on but it's more like you refer to private investors so maybe norms could be interpreted differently by the affected actors and by those who are asked differently as well as by the public so depending on whom's behaviour these norms refer to this could determine also the process how an international norm evolves so we thank you very much to all the panellists and to the discussant and we'd like to now we've got 25 minutes to open it up on the floor so if I could take three questions to start with I'll take Alex and at the back and what's your Nathan okay first Alex then yeah thanks I just wanted to ask a question mostly directed at these although I think everyone is free to answer because there's a lot of great experience up there on this panel but I had a question about what basically the question that you had is do you have a hypothesis about what it is that differentiates the sort of norm setting approach in the divestment space versus the fossil fuel subsidy reform space number one and number two excuse me I agree that it seems somewhat odd that those two discourses haven't really connected as much as as they could especially given that in a lot of ways fossil fuel subsidies are and public finance or fossil fuels of which there's a subsidy component are in some way sort of the public divestment right of our governments are investing in fossil fuels even more directly in a lot of ways than a lot of the types of asset managers that are being targeted by the divestment movement so why aren't we also talking about that in a little bit more of a directed and pointy way and how can we connect those two movements and these two issues and it's something we've been working a little bit with some of the more sort of movement focused groups that are working on the divestment issue at oil change but I'd be curious on your thoughts about what we could do to do a better job of that great thanks at the back right at the back by the door sorry my question is to Shirley my question is to Shirley no we can't hear you my question is to Shirley about complementary measures I'm actually from a developing country specifically in Nigeria so basically in a country where weak institutional structures and a centralised system how do you ensure equity in terms of distribution of complementary measures I also have a question of sustainability of such measures for example speaking from Nigeria there's a syndrome of legacy whereby a government puts in a measure and the next government changes that how do you ensure sustainability and question of transparency for example now there's a 5000 Naira thing going on in Nigeria for unemployed graduates as part of the subsidy reform initiative and there's a big question on transparency how do we ensure this money doesn't go to the rich or they already employed especially in a country where there's no strong database for the citizens and my second question is for international norms the recent Paris deal talks about 100 billion dollars for green initiatives if I'm correct but again institutions like World Bank giving fossil fuels producers about 500 billion annually there's a mismatch so how do we address that a question for Ties as well in the paper you mentioned that detail is not necessarily helpful for adoption of certain frames in that the broader sometimes more ambiguous frames are helpful for adoption but you've seen a lot of norm contestation around what defines a subsidy in the subsidy reform movement and I'm curious your thoughts on to what extent this debate around what defines a particular subsidy is helpful you've seen it in the climate science climate change debate writ large around climate science and the debate sometimes around some of the climate science being used as a way to delay policy change I'm just curious your thoughts on that and then one quick question for Michelle around the it's a hypothetical around the influence of international sources or the influence of international sources on local decision making around subsidy reform you had a scale that looked at main source relevant at times and irrelevant and I was curious if you reframe that is there any source that would be actually worse than irrelevant but not helpful and damaging to subsidy reform efforts so I'm specifically thinking about certain international financial institutions or international environmental groups is that seen as a detriment to subsidy reform process okay I'm going to take two more questions one here one right at the back sorry write it back again just it's a Richard Dennis in the Australian Institute my question I guess touches on a few of the papers but in terms of the norms and why why the divestment and subsidy campaigns might not talk to each other is one answer that the point Sheila made at the beginning subsidies are highly political and divestment is all about empowering individuals or institutions to take action outside of politics so while they've got finance in common I think deep down there's a fundamentally different approach and the other point I'll leave it there there's a lot of questions thank you for the three interesting paper I'm quite curious about what's the influence of the role of the global subsidy initiative reform this kind of movement initiative so I'm curious about what's the role and influence of this global international know their influence to the domestic industry papers and especially to Sheila you look at the three country cases so what so do you think this reform is basically come from the international driven or domestic driven thank you okay I think what we're going to do remember that there will be a whole paper discussing GSI later on so maybe we can perhaps put that aside and focus on the papers that we have here but like if we could have one response from each of the panellists to the questions but pick a question that responds to what you want to ask and then we'll be able to get back out to get more questions and Sheila do you want to go first on the paper so the paper is published as a background paper is published under the umbrella of the new climate economy it's part of a chapter which is actually focused on carbon pricing and the linkages between subsidies and carbon pricing so if you imagine we wrote a 40 page paper with 15 case studies of which they picked the bits that they thought were important and influential to put into this larger kind of flagship paper that new climate economy published and I think that's why we didn't go into depth in a lot of areas because we were basically giving them a menu of options so this is the most ambitious challenging from the international perspective in terms of options so it was very superficial and the most we did was really reference papers on others who had written in depth about how do you get this in a trade agreement how is this done through Namas and NDCs like the GSI were so that's why a lot of that was superficial in terms of the questions on Nigeria and I was actually with the shadow kind of development team in the UK so the kind of shadow team for labour and I got the exact same questions last week on in a country like Nigeria how do you address a lot of these questions because even when you give this menu it seems very oh if you do this this this eight things it's going to be fine and you obviously have a lot of issues of credibility in a number of countries credibility of government to actually collect the revenue from subsidy reform and reallocate it or redirect it and also of institutions and this that you actually have subsidies because of weak institutions so you provide the subsidy because it's the easiest way of providing some support in a distributed way I mean I'm not an expert in this but a lot of people in this room are the one thing I would say is that there is you know what we hope is that if you start to show examples then countries can look to neighbours in their region about how have they done this how have they you know where are there opportunities to build greater institutional capacity how is this linked to other areas around transparency of government and other kind of anti corruption initiatives I think the the kind of regional support that you could get from country to country is really you know could be quite useful where and that I think in all countries I mean in the cases that we've looked at more in depth in the context of education finance it always seems like you have these reform episodes so also this is very common where you have a government that makes a big change the next government pulls it back a bit then the next government makes a big one I think in general you still get a positive movement but it's often kind of two steps forward one step back two steps forward one step back and I got other can talk to this and then lastly around this question of international versus domestic driven I mean I think it is domestic driven at the heart of it and if you're going to focus on subsidy reform it has to be really at a country level or we're looking at the EU at the kind of regional level in work that we're doing on production subsidies but it can't be divorced from the international there's always ways in which some of these norms can change a lot through international approaches so you know let's say 80% of the effort at the country level 20% international but you know there's yeah I got it Thanks to the discussion and to the audience for interesting questions and comments I won't go into detail on anything but I wanted to touch upon Alex's point about why those two campaigns or norms haven't really talked to each other yet and actually I should redirect the question to you looking forward to international but my take is that both campaigns would benefit from closer engagements but in the end it's up to governments to lead the way because if norms are most powerful I think not just when they are imposed ethical standards but when they lead actors to conceive their own proper interests in different ways if you can bring that about then you are really a powerful lever to bring about change and so in that sense I think governments should lead the way not just by reforming their subsidies but also by steering all of their finances away from fossil fuels in development aid export credits in all sorts of finance and when that happens I think then you go already a long way towards showing the private sector that it's in their interest to sell their stocks in fossil fuels a question to Michelle about Trinidad and Tobago with regard to if some sources are actually detrimental I guess the way I focused this is that I focused on the sources that are influential in keeping the subsidy and those that are influential in removing the subsidy so I guess that's the detrimental would be those that were more important for keeping the subsidy those were the forces that went against the system and then with regard to the point on equity I sort of raised it in my paper it's an international equity issue as well because Trinidad together with all of the SIDS contributes to about 0.1% of carbon emissions and yet there's this great push to remove the subsidy which the rest of the country sees as beneficial so the question is should we bother with the international norm and focus on national development are there two discourses are we living in two worlds so I can take some more questions I'll take Chris Ron and what's your name Vernon and Tom and then we're going to stop see what we can get so this is a comment for all three of this people who presented it was interesting to see the papers which have got reform in the title but nobody present in the definition of what we mean by reform and I think that's a really important question to ask because it really affects what we talk about and even then we need to go back and say what do we mean by a subsidy so I think it's really tempting to define a subsidy it's like an item of expenditure in a budget and when that item of expenditure goes down you know hurrah like subsidy reform has happened success but when you look at case studies of countries with subsidies you see subsidies coming back again and again no matter what frame you want to put on this issue if we're reforming for fiscal reasons if we're doing it for social reasons or if we're doing it for environmental reasons like ultimately we want to see a long term exit from subsidisation so that I think is the sensible way to define reform but I don't think that that's actually how reform is kind of operationalised a lot when it's discussed so people will typically talk about reform as basically any change to a fuel subsidy policy and that's why it works in terms of norm setting right because reform is a politically expedient word so it can fit lots of different countries definitions of what it means to alter their subsidy policies in a way which can capture a broad array of viewpoints but the right way to move forward in this area and I think that it's an issue because when we're talking about how to advise countries to reform their subsidies and also when we're talking about the politics of reforming subsidies we often get hung up on price increases and price increases I don't think should be taking a synonymous with reform and I'm going to present on this later today so I'm ruining my presentation later but we've done a lot of work on this and I think in our view the right way to think of a subsidies is a structural feature of an economy it's not just an item of expenditure but it's also a whole bunch of aspects of the economy which make it likely that subsidies are going to be used as a policy tool and they're going to come back as a policy tool so if we wanted to find reform properly we'd be talking about the political economy of price increases but I think as Sheila raised we've got to be talking about the capacity to use other tools to assist people I think something that didn't come out strongly in your paper Sheila and it would be great to see more weight given to it's this whole issue of pricing systems if you don't come up with a new system for pricing fuel subsidies are definitely going to come back and Michelle I thought that was really interesting in your paper seeing that that was one of the areas that appears not to have been implemented so you know I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on is it likely that Trinadag and Tobago is going to reintroduce subsidies if we see world oil prices go back up to over 100 dollars a barrel so you know what are we talking about we're talking about reform that has succeeded or not and I think another comment Sheila on social mitigation which is something I'm going to talk about later myself anyway but I think it's really important to raise now is we often look to social mitigation as this great solution like ha ha we've overcome a political economy obstacle but actually they can be a political economy barrier as well right so how you reallocate the money is a big fight different people have got really different ideas about the sorts of policy tools that are going to be effective or not in terms of better targeting or spreading wealth so that equity debate can be a force that pushes forward reform but can also be a force that complicates reform and for any government who wants to have a successful long term reform getting to grips with that political economy issue as well as the issue of prices going up prices changing regularly is I think often overlooked and certainly isn't reflected well in a lot of debate on this issue so I think that's just a general comment sorry it took so long to make and then lastly I think just on the paper on Trinidad and Tobago I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts being in a room so full of people who are working internationally in international organisations you really want to try to influence national reforms in a positive way it was really interesting to hear the reality of your analysis which was just that international actors aren't making a big impact so I just hear you comment on that does that matter, is it important is it a bad thing, is it a good thing is it very specific to Trinidad and Tobago perhaps because it's a very small economy it doesn't have the same kind of way of focus perhaps from international actors and also I guess you partly answered the question already on the norms that may or may not be relevant there is community mismatch sorry anyway wrong, we are going to have to be quick if we want to hear the answer wrong yeah a very quick comment actually responding to some remarks that Laura made at the beginning but also it's relevant to Tice's paper and perhaps Sheila and Laurie's and I keep coming back to history here but Laura made the point about the long hall in here and I think anybody doing research in this area particularly political research really needs to go back a lot further one of the biggest papers done in this area was in 1987 by Mark Cosmo for the World Resources Institute and basically he did the first global look at the underpricing of energy and electricity and so forth it's a 71 page report anybody wants to know I can give them the link to it that report inspired the World Bank which in the early 90s did a big report that then got taken up by the G7 it was a major item in the G7 in the early 1990s they then in turn sponsored a big series of reports in the OECD those came out in the late 1990s and then I think people lost interest because the world prices of oil fell but there was a lot of work that really shaped how we look at we measure subsidies done in that period I myself was involved in quantifying coal subsidies in the 1988 and so then it came back in the late 2000s and definitely the G20 declaration has been very instrumental but there was a lot of work that went on long before that and to Victor sorry thank you a question for this you had an intriguing line in one of your slides the taboo of fossil fuel subsidy reform in OECD countries and I was I wondered whether you might just explain what you meant by that and possibly related to that question have you detected any particular features of the norm development of fossil fuel subsidy reform or differences between developed fossil fuel subsidy reform and subsidy reform in developing countries in terms of the norm development Tom alright thank you for all the presentations I've heard a lot of vantage points history is important knowing the whole context is important and I would like to add one to that a little bit to Sheila's paper as well we keep mentioning the need for gradual reform for phasening reform for being very well prepared and all of that is true but there's a big distinction in these concepts and if you look at the reality of reform what do we see in most countries countries reform when there's a huge crisis and there's a win of opportunity in the next months so the question really that I think we should be more focusing on is how do we prepare reform in a very short time frame how do we increase acceptability and when you have a look at behavioural psychology and behavioural realism there are a few lessons that you can draw and one is that people accept reform when it is unavoidable and when there is no alternative and that means gradual reform might not be the best recipe for real political context stakeholders move when they're conflicted on something and when they have a wall in front of them gradual reform does not work like that so I think gradual I mean I don't want to oppose gradual reform it is the best recipe for success and so on but it doesn't really correspond to the political reality of reform that we're seeing out there so really we should be focusing way more on how do we have mitigation measures on the short term which are acceptable how do we reach particular stakeholders in our work programmes this is slightly related to what Tom just raised but this is again directed to Sheila especially on the complementary measures so can you elaborate or give a couple of instances or examples where the complementary measure was taken and how effectively they were communicated to the general masses that yes they are reducing subsidy on one front and this is the complementary measure which is probably going to benefit the population more and how effective that communication was choose the questions you want to answer so it was very interesting I spoke with I went to the home of one of our former prime ministers and I asked him and he says no no no they're not important and that continued along and what does that tell me what they're faced with is the information that they have and the information that they can give to the public and the international actors come in once or twice and meet with the government so the international actors can be more effective is providing the government with what it needs to be able to take those steps which is the data which we don't have the data and also providing a mechanism so that the data can be more transparently given to the general public and there's part of that which is possible and that's the missing gap which it's not efficient for the international actors to come and say you really should work on subsidy reform Trinidad and Tobago's co-chair of one of the main groups preparing for the recent negotiations so we had a high profile so one would have expected because of the high profile in the UNFCCC that environmental norms would have penetrated and it didn't so that's the missing link I want to start by thanking Ron for giving that historical perspective I think it's very relevant and very intriguing as well to hear that the momentum faded away in the late 1990s because oil prices were low whereas now we are always saying that low oil prices are a conducive environment for subsidy reform so it would be interesting to hear what the drivers were behind the attention that was given in the late 1990s late 1980s early 1990s and the reasons why it faded away with regard to Vernon's comment or reaction what was on the slide taboo of fossil fuels subsidies in OECD was perhaps a bit too blunt or starkly formulated what I just wanted to say is that if you look for instance at the IA it reports on consumer subsidies which are mostly located in non OECD countries and it is almost completely science about production subsidies so that's a bit the distinction I made but where you say but how are these norms diffused to developing countries and developed countries is there a difference I think that's a very interesting question and we have to look more into that how those norms trickle down to the national level and whether they are used by different factions in the political debate on the national level and how they are translated and reinterpreted and used by different actors so that's one of the ideas that we also had in developing the paper that's going down from the global level and seeing how those global norms develop into arguments in national buttons I think there are a lot of comments and I think I think I either agree with or support a lot of what has been said I think the objective for the paper was to take information to an audience that wasn't looking at subsidy reform at all and try to make the case that this is actually possible and that there are examples of not one country or one place where this has happened perfectly but if you piece together these different elements you can get some kind of a road map and some examples that you can reference I think what I'm hoping is a lot of the questions that have been asked will actually be bottomed out a lot more over these two days so for instance on this question of phasing and I kind of tried to caveat it in what I said which is that of course this I think what we hear so what I've given you is like at the international level here's a bunch of points that you could take into account and here's some case studies but we've I think getting consensus this is about in a country what would work in a sector in that country what would work in that sector what fuel are you talking about I mean in terms of what you want to do if it's fast or slow if it's gradual or immediate I mean all these questions really depend on getting down to that level which is where this 80% national if you want to take that as a framing is the important point the important point of local actors so there aren't the phasing in is more that when we looked across all the evidence very rapid seem to be on balance probably less the kind of general advice you would want to give but of course there are cases in which this is actually what you have to do and you have to take account of political opportunities on the communication question I'm just going to put this back because I think we'll get you will probably talk about the India case and what has been done on communication so I think you are better place to speak about this but I think on communication we also hear on production subsidy reform maybe you don't want to do communication at all right so even in these cases there's a whole bunch of stuff where on certain reforms you might want to be working very much kind of inside our strategy not very public facing and you might be able to get changed in a way that kind of stays below the radar and that's how it happens so I think there's nuance to all of this and what I'm hoping I think we'll get in the rest of the day today and tomorrow is a lot more of that because we'll be talking about countries, fuels and real experience so I don't know if that's too much of a diversion oh and just to Chris most put 15 cases of fossil fuel subsidy and price reform in the slide because a lot of our examples are about price reform and this is a really valid point and on this the terminology the defining of the terminology is very important and we often will talk about a phase out as opposed to reform and I think it really is contextual in terms of what terms you want to use but clarity around that particularly in this community is really important and clarity between what's a price reform and what's a subsidy reform is also very important which we didn't have the opportunity to do as much as we should have maybe in that paper and it came back from some of the peer reviewers as well I'm just going to see Martina do you want to add anything more on the back of what the questions that we've had through in your reviews of the paper no okay so I'm going to just wrap up by saying by using my chair's privilege to mention some publications that we have on all these issues the first we published in 2013 which is the guide book to fossil fuel subsidy reform for south east Asia and Chris authored that with other people many others who are in the room here and this was a very good publication that was a hand book for people in south east Asia but applies across the world on how to do reforms and that we have a three pillar approach around pricing communications and mitigation with many examples from many countries including taking a gradual approach as well as a big bang kind of approach reform so I recommend if people are interested to include this in their references and to read this report but also to look at it for valuable advice in terms of how to do this in country on the question of bringing it into nationally determined contributions we did some research with GIZ where we've gone through all the nationally determined contributions and found about 13 included fossil fuel subsidy reform within that 40 included fiscal measures on climate change more generally we produced a large publication with the Nordic Council ministers called tackling fossil fuel subsidies and climate change levelling the energy playing field which talks about this interlinkage between fossil fuel subsidies climate change and the UNF triple C so this was these have been our contributions along with many many many studies from particular countries over the years but these were some that we raised and that came up here and so thank you very much all the panellists please can we give them a big round of applause and thank you very much for participating and providing questions okay