DEVELOPING THE REGULATORY INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

Attracting private investment in clean energy requires more than good intentions—it requires the right policy and regulatory environment. But until recently, there was no globally comparable way to measure whether countries were actually putting that environment in place. Policymakers had no reliable tool for benchmarking their frameworks against regional and global peers; investors had no systematic basis for assessing the policy risks of deploying capital in unfamiliar markets; and researchers had no consistent data for tracking whether reforms were translating into results. The World Bank wanted to fill that gap by developing a set of global indicators—the Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy (RISE)—that would benchmark country-level progress across the four pillars of sustainable energy: access to electricity, access to clean cooking, energy efficiency, and renewable energy.

The World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to design the RISE framework. We began with an extensive review of existing indicator frameworks used by other institutions, identifying what had been measured before and where the gaps were. We developed a shortlist of candidate indicators and tested them against the perspectives of more than 150 sector experts and private investors, ensuring that the framework captured what actually mattered for policy and investment decisions rather than what was merely measurable. We then conducted a desk pilot across six countries to validate the proposed indicators against real-world data and refine the methodology based on what we found. Each indicator was designed to target a specific element of the policy or regulatory regime important to mobilizing investment: from planning processes and institutions to dedicated incentive programs and financially sound utilities. Finally, we developed an external prospectus to raise donor funding for full implementation of the framework at global scale.

RISE has since grown into one of the most widely used tools for benchmarking energy sector policy and regulatory frameworks globally. It now covers 140 countries representing more than 98 percent of the world's population, and is updated regularly to track how policies evolve over time—allowing policymakers, researchers, and investors to monitor progress and analyze the relationship between reforms and results. Beyond its value to national governments benchmarking their frameworks against regional and global peers, RISE serves as a practical reference for private investors and developers assessing where to deploy capital in sustainable energy. The time-series dimension of the tool, tracking policy implementation dating back to 2010, has made it a valuable resource for researchers studying the causal links between policy reform and investment outcomes.