A Guidebook to Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform for Southeast Asian Policymakers

A Guidebook to Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform for Policy-Makers in Southeast Asia crystallized international experience and best-practice and set out a generic series of steps for planning a reform strategy, illustrated with country experience from the region and internationally.

The guidance is split across three pillars: Getting the Prices Right; Managing Impacts; and, Building Support for Reform. The Guidebook includes sections on how to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the impacts of subsidies and their reform using common tools and techniques, as well as key steps and concerns in communicating about subsidy reform.

The Guidebook was designed to draw on country needs and priorities by beginning with an inception mission to Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, to meet country officials and to identify the most important concerns for planning reform. The project was designed to work in step with a separate project, a Forum on Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform for Policy-Makers in Southeast Asia. This brought together the policy-makers who had been identified during inception missions, providing them an opportunity to share experiences with each other, as well as to present the preliminary draft of findings from the Guidebook, and to draw on policy-makers feedback in finalizing the publication. The Guidebook was also peer-reviewed by 21 experts in energy and policy.

The Guidebook project also led to a number of derivative publications, based on work by country consultants. This included the Citizens’ Guides to fossil-fuel subsidies in Malaysia and Thailand and a case study on Lessons Learned from the Philippines.