The regulation and governance of renewable energy has historically been highly fragmented internationally, with ‘no overarching regulation that specifically addresses energy’. There are a number of international organisations that have renewable energy within their purview: the IRENA, the IEA, the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) and the EU. However, these organisations either have limited membership (the IEA and the EU), or have not actively sought to promote the legal harmonisation of renewable energy law (the ECT) or actively intervened in trade disputes (the IRENA).

From an economic perspective, countries legislate to support the accelerated deployment of electricity generated from renewable energy sources in order to correct a number of market failures that afflict the sector. These market failures were analysed in , and include the failure to price externalities into energy prices, positive spillovers and learning effects and information asymmetries.