EnergyPROSPECTS (PROactive Strategies and Policies for Energy Citizenship Transformation)

The report presents a detailed analysis of the major political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal conditions that shape the emergence, manifestations and transformations of energy citizenship at EU level. The report and resulting PESTEL analysis will serve as the reference point for the energy citizenship as observed in different national and local contexts.

This document results from task 3.3, which deals with the preliminary analysis of the 596 cases of energy citizenship and their distribution among the typology ideal-types elaborated in D2.2. The analysis and typology development will facilitate the creation of new insights into the diversity of energy citizenship. D3.2 encompasses a catalogue of cases organised by the conceptual types that were identified in task 2.2. It entails a presentation of each typology type, including refinements based on the outcomes of the empirical work. Following the description of each typology type, a presentation of exemplary cases catalogued in EnergyPROSPECTS is included, as well as some other cases where typologisation is less certain. These cases raise interesting issues related to our study of energy citizenship. All the cases of energy citizenship mapped in EnergyPROSPECTS are included in this deliverable. Additionally, the catalogue will also be made available as a searchable online database at a later point during the project.

The importance of social and institutional innovations in the energy transition has become increasingly evident in recent years. The quest for new institutional arrangements and social relations has been accompanied by the proliferation of new concepts: Energy democracy, energy justice, energy poverty and energy literacy are interrogating and opening up the social relations that carry the energy system. These concepts serve analytical purposes, but they also provide tools for critical diagnosis and transformative action. Scholars, activists and politicians deploy these terms to introduce new social constructions, counter-narratives and imaginaries of an energy system that-by certain standards-is more sustainable and organised in a just manner. A particularly prominent example of these new imaginaries is energy citizenship. Coined originally as an emancipatory concept and as an alternative imaginary of capable and involved citizens, it has also been proven to be vulnerable to ideological appropriation and narrow instrumental interpretations. The tendencies towards responsibilisation, exclusion and reproduced power inequalities are well-known in studies of participatory governance, empowerment and sustainability transitions. This paper argues however that ENCI should not be mistaken for yet another buzzword. Rather than rejecting the concept, it needs to be taken seriously as an emerging governmentality and as a set of ideals that are meaningful to people that try to make sense of the current phase of the energy transition. Our critical-constructive analysis identifies three interrelated clusters of challenges in ENCI research: These pertain to, 1) the multiplicity of ideals; 2) the performativity of idealizing social constructions and 3) the associated methodological challenges of operationalizing the concept into concrete empirical observables and relevant 'cases of energy citizenship'. This operationalization is arguably a crucial step in the scientific-societal co-production of models and practices of sustainable, democratic or otherwise desirable forms of energy citizenship.

Within this deliverable we examine how energy citizenship, and the associated normative ideals of ‘active’ energy citizenship, has developed and continues to develop differently across European contexts. We report the results from four (local language) one-day regional workshops, hosted in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Hungary.

This deliverable elaborates the fundamentals of the conceptual framework (D 2.1) into a conceptual typology of energy citizenship (ENCI). Following a robust methodology, ten ideal-types are presented and discussed in this document. This innovative conceptual typology captures the breadth of energy citizenship in terms of conceptual forms, thus encompassing both existing and possible types. It will be modified or refined according to the project's forthcoming empirical results.

This deliverable describes the conceptual framework on energy citizenship. It lays down the key definitions, theoretical underpinnings and social constructions of the required systematic energy citizenship understanding. The conceptual framework discloses the diversity of more and less 'active' energy citizenship forms, identifying the main distinctions brought forward in the state-of-the-art of social innovation and transitions, political science, sociology, energy studies, social psychology, geography and critical social theory. This also involves elaboration of the different understandings of the energy systems that energy citizenship can be taken to refer to.