The Energy Transition in Brazil and the Controversy over the Role of State-Owned Enterprises

Abstract This paper examines how state ownership in the energy sector is linked to climate-related policies, focusing on the Brazilian context. Brazil’s experience is a relevant case study, having undergone significant privatization in the 2010s and early 2020s, followed by the recent announcement of an ambitious industrial policy aimed at reindustrializing the economy and supporting the energy transition. In this sense, the paper’s key objective is, on the one hand, to investigate the recent literature on energy transition focusing on both the energy sector and the state ownership policies, on the other, to bring about the Brazilian experience on privatization and disinvestment policies in the Brazilian energy industry to shed some light on the limits on the new industrial policy proposals concerning energy transition.