UC Santa Barbara

This thesis examines the structural barriers that constrain renewable energy investment in developing countries in general and then shifts focus to examine why renewable energy investment and deployment in Bangladesh lags behind that of comparable lower-middle-income economies. The research on structural barriers is based on a quantitative analysis of a panel of 103 low- and middle-income countries from 2000 to 2022. Pooled ordinary least squares with year fixed effects is paired with a two-way fixed effects specification across five outcomes covering renewable energy investment and the share of solar, wind, and total renewables in electricity generation. Regulatory quality is found to be positively and significantly associated with renewable energy investment. Land pressure, measured as people per square kilometer of non-agricultural land, is negatively associated with the renewable share of generation. Political stability is positively associated with investment per capita.The qualitative component applies George and Bennett's (2005) structured, focused comparison method to Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan. The case studies explain how environmental constraints, governance arrangements and institutional path dependence operate in practice. Vietnam's feed-in-tariff regime added 16.5 gigawatts of solar capacity within three years through a credible price signal and a centralized governance. Pakistan's rooftop solar boom developed largely outside the formal utility-scale sector, driven by abundant land, rising retail tariffs, and consumer-led adoption. Bangladesh faces all three barriers: extreme land pressure raises siting costs, weak regulatory quality undermines investor confidence, and capacity-payment obligations to legacy fossil-fuel plants consume the fiscal space required for renewable procurement. The interaction of barriers, rather than any single condition, explains the divergent outcomes observed across the three cases.The thesis proposes a sequenced reform agenda for Bangladesh that addresses capacity-payment lock-in, distributed solar enablement, institutional consolidation under the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority, competitive auctions, and pilot deployment of agrivoltaics and floating solar. The framework also generalizes to other lower-middle-income countries where land scarcity, governance fragmentation, and fossil-fuel lock-in interact to constrain renewable energy investment.