Policy pathfinding toward affordable and clean energy: The role of country context in harmonizing energy equity, energy security, and environmental sustainability

Understanding how humanizing energy reconciles the synergies and trade-offs among the three dimensions of the energy trilemma—energy equity, energy security, and environmental sustainability—is crucial for advancing affordable and clean energy. However, evidence regarding its role remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining the direct and indirect effects of country-specific contextual factors—macroeconomic stability, government effectiveness, and innovation capability—on the energy trilemma across the world's top nine energy trilemma performers over the period 2000-2023. Regarding the direct effects, the Markov regime-switching panel VAR model identifies two distinct regimes and reveals downward, upward, and upward states for energy equity, energy security, and environmental sustainability, respectively. Furthermore, the impulse-response analysis yields three key findings. First, the adverse effects of unfavorable macroeconomic conditions on the dimensions of the energy trilemma are mitigated under both regimes. Second, government effectiveness enables countries to achieve a more balanced energy trilemma, particularly under regime 1. Third, innovation capability does not necessarily improve energy system performance under either regime. Building on these findings, the mediation analysis reveals four principal mediation mechanisms. First, macroeconomic stability establishes a threefold mediating relationship among the dimensions of the energy trilemma, thereby facilitating a more balanced management of the complex interactions among its three dimensions. Second, energy security acts as a mediating mechanism through which government effectiveness influences environmental sustainability. Third, environmental sustainability mediates the relationship between government effectiveness and energy security. Fourth, environmental sustainability also serves as a mediating mechanism linking innovation capability to energy security. Collectively, these findings underscore that sustaining leadership in the energy transition requires adaptive, integrated, context-sensitive, and human-centered policy frameworks that reflect each country's institutional capacity, economic structure, technological capability, and energy system characteristics.