Governing The Energy Transition

The Energy Transition, the inevitable shift away from cheap, centralized, largely fossil-based energy systems, is one of the core challenges of our time. This book provides a coherent and novel insight into the nature of this challenge and possible strategies to accelerate and guide such transitions. It brings together prominent European scholars and practitioners from the fields of energy transition research and governance to draw attention to the current complex dynamics in the energy domain, and offer elegant and provocative explanations for current crises and lock-ins. They identify multiple energy transition pathways that emerge and increasingly compete, and emphasize the need and possibilities for novel governance. By analysing the complexity of energy transition processes and the difficulties in shifting to sustainable pathways, this text questions the extent to which actually governing energy transitions is already reality, just an illusion, or a bare necessity.

The limited sustainability of our current energy supply systems necessitates a transition to a more sustainable system. Taking a systemic, socio-cultural approach, this book provides new insights into the nature of this challenge and explores possible strategies to accelerate and guide such transitions.

"This compact book argues that ideas about accountability and legitimation - drawn from work on environmental governance - can open up new analytical perspectives on what is holding back effective energy system transformation. With bite-size chapters and illustrative cases that draw on the work of five expert witnesses, this is a novel intervention into debates over the politics of energy transition."--Professor Gavin Bridge, Durham University, UK "The book theorizes and advances the research frontier on legitimation practices and accountability with a carefully crafted analysis bridging scholarly fields of environmental governance, political economy, energy research and democratic theory. It is a must-read for all students and scholars interested in shaping more legitimate, democratic and accountable energy transition from the local to global context." -Professor Karin Bäckstrand, Stockholm University, Sweden This open access book reframes sustainable energy transitions as being a matter of resolving accountability crises. It demonstrates how the empirical study of several practices of legitimation can analytically deconstruct energy transitions, and presents a typology of these practices to help determine whether energy transitions contribute to sustainability. The real-world challenge of climate change requires sustainable energy transitions. This presents a crisis of accountability legitimated through situated practices in a wide range of cases including: solar energy transitions in Portugal, urban energy transitions in Germany, forestland conflicts in Indonesia, urban carbon emission targets in Norway, transport electrification in the Nordic region, and biodiversity conservation and energy extraction in the USA. By synthesising these cases, chapters identify various dimensions wherein practices of legitimation construct specific accountability relations. This book deftly illustrates the value of an analytical approach focused on accountable governa nce to enable sustainable energy transitions. It will be of great use to both academics and practitioners working in the field of energy transitions. Siddharth Sareen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the University of Bergen, Norway.

This open access book gathers the results of an interdisciplinary research project led by the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER CREST) and jointly implemented by several universities. It identifies political, economic and legal challenges and opportunities in the energy transition from a governance perspective by exploring a variety of tools that allow state, non-state and transnational actors to manage the transition of the energy industry toward less fossil-fuel reliance. When analyzing the roles of these actors, the authors examine not only formal procedures such as political and democratic processes, but also market behavior and societal practices. In other words, the handbook focuses on both the behavior and the positive and normative frameworks of political actors, bureaucracies, courts, international organizations, lobby groups, civil society, economic actors and individuals. The authors subsequently use their findings to formulate specific guidelines for lawmakers and other rule-makers, as well as private and public actors. To do so, they draw on approaches stemming from the legal, political and management sciences.

A volume on the political economy of clean energy transition in developed and developing regions, with a focus on the issues that different countries face as they transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon technologies.

The world is currently undergoing an historic energy transition, driven by increasingly stringent decarbonisation policies and rapid advances in low-carbon technologies. The large-scale shift to low-carbon energy is disrupting the global energy system, impacting whole economies, and changing the political dynamics within and between countries. This open access book, written by leading energy scholars, examines the economic and geopolitical implications of the global energy transition, from both regional and thematic perspectives. The first part of the book addresses the geopolitical implications in the world’s main energy-producing and energy-consuming regions, while the second presents in-depth case studies on selected issues, ranging from the geopolitics of renewable energy, to the mineral foundations of the global energy transformation, to governance issues in connection with the changing global energy order. Given its scope, the book will appeal to researchers in energy, climate change and international relations, as well as to professionals working in the energy industry.

Local Energy Governance: Opportunities and Challenges for Renewable and Decentralised Energy in France and Japan examines the extent of the energy transition taking place at a local level in France and Japan, two countries that share ambitious targets regarding the reduction of GHG emissions, their share of renewable energy and their degree of market liberalization. This book observes local energy policies and initiatives and applies an institutional and legal analysis to help identify barriers but also opportunities in the development of renewable energies in the territories. The book will highlight governance features that incubate energy transition at the local level through interdisciplinary contributions that offer legal, political, sociological and technological perspectives. Overall, the book will draw conclusions that will also be informative for other countries aiming at promoting renewable energies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy policy and energy governance.

This book investigates and evaluates the opportunities and limitations of network governance in building local capacity for energy infrastructure governance. Presenting a comparative analysis of three city cases from across Europe- Birmingham, Frankfurt and Budapest- this book demonstrates how local factors shape the prospect of network governance to support low-carbon energy transitions. It maps out existing governance networks, highlighting the actors involved and their interactions with one another, and also discusses the role and embeddedness of networks in the urban governance of low-carbon energy. Drawing on case study evidence, Nochta develops a comparative analysis which discusses the intricate connections between network characteristics, context and impact. It highlights that organisational fragmentation; the complexity of the low-carbon energy problem and historical developments all influence network characteristics in terms of degree of integration and vertical (hierarchical) power relationships among network actors. Overall, the book concludes that understanding such links between context and networks is crucial when designing and implementing new governance models aimed at facilitating and governing low-carbon urban development. Low-Carbon Energy Transitions in European Cities will be of great interest to scholars of energy policy, urban governance and sustainability transitions.