Technology Matters: The Cases of the Liberalization of Electricity and Railways

This article deals with the interrelation between changing technological features and evolving institutional arrangements of the liberalizing electricity and railways sectors. The article is grounded in a systematic analysis of the technical features of the electricity and railways sectors, and argues that certain critical technical functions need to be supported by suitable institutional arrangements in order to safeguard a satisfactory technical functioning of these infrastructures. The article also assumes that it is necessary to align technological and institutional regimes into a coherent framework in order to ensure sustainable functioning of the various network industries (i.e., our assumption of "coherence"). Finally, the article argues that the (institutional) regulation of these two important sectors needs to take technology explicitly into consideration, either as an enabling or restricting factor.