The institutional space of community initiatives for renewable energy: a comparative case study of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark
By Marieke Oteman, M. Wiering, J. Helderman. 2014
234 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundCommunity initiatives for renewable energy are emerging across Europe but with varying numbers, success rates and strategies. A literature overview identifies structural, strategic and biophysical conditions for community success. Our analysis focuses on institutional structure, as we describe the variety between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and place this within the institutional context of the policies, power structures and energy discourses of each country.MethodsWe conducted a policy arrangements analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews, extensive content analysis of policy documents, media analysis and use of existing research, in a qualitative comparative analysis between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.ResultsWe demonstrate that the (evolving) institutional configuration of the energy sector strongly influences the available space for community initiative development. Denmark has a traditionally civil society-friendly energy sector, although opportunities for communities have decreased following the scaling up of production facilities. The Netherlands knows a predominantly market-oriented institutional arrangement that leaves little space for communities, but the potential for community based energy is increasingly recognized. In Germany, the typically state-dominant Energiewende strategy creates a window of opportunity for community initiatives that fit within the state policy.ConclusionsWe conclude that the institutional arrangement of the energy policy subsystem can both constrain or enable community energy projects. Decentralization appears to be one of the most important characteristics of the general institutional development and generally increases the institutional space for local (community) players. The alignment of discourses across government levels and actors is one of the important enabling features of an energy system, as it provides the stability and predictability of the system that enables communities to engage in renewable energy projects.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d028d0aa54ecccab6c2130e14689212c954d0454
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
In Global and Planetary Change
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Citations in the corpus
- Statistical Evidence on the Role of Energy Cooperatives for the Energy Transition in European Countries (2018, background): “However, energy cooperatives continue to rely on governmental support to play a role in liberal markets and against incumbents [7,12,19,29].”
- Do natural resources impede renewable energy production in the EU? A mixed-methods analysis (2019, unknown): “For example, unlike Germany with its large industry for solar panels and Denmark with its turbine manufacturing, the Netherlands does not have a sizeable industry for building renewable facilities (Oteman et al., 2014).”
- Taking stock of the local impacts of community owned renewable energy: A review and research agenda (2018, background): “local needs, it has been argued that CRE projects, designed and driven by local residents, create platforms for open deliberative processes that rest o public engagement in political processes and provide tangible openings for citizen engagemen t with complex global social and environmental problems”