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The interlinked nature of today’s societal challenges asks for integrative approaches. The energy transition is an especially impactful challenge and presents a compelling opportunity to pursue integration, as it requires changes to space, landscape, infrastructure and organizations at different scales. While the added value of integrative approaches that address the energy transition alongside other societal challenges is widely acknowledged, it is not the status quo. The aim of this study is to uncover the institutional barriers to integration and suggest possibilities for redesign. The paper sheds light on a hitherto relatively understudied phase of integration, namely implementation. Two illustrative cases for energy transition integration are discussed; (i) sustainable residential heating combined with climate adaptation in the urban context, and (ii) biogas production from livestock manure for rural residential heating and nitrogen reduction in the Netherlands. Inspired by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) and networks of action situations (NAS) concept, the study shows that in the context of energy transition integration, action situations are pillarized with incidental interactions happening between sectors and across scales. The rules that govern actor interactions stem from sectoral institutional arrangements and produce sectoral action situations. Factors that especially obstruct integration are financial streams, budgeting and designated task responsibilities of actors that favour sectoral, one-dimensional projects. Actors interact in sectoral action situations and struggle to establish links to plan for more integrative outcomes. As a way forward, the study illustrates how rules can be redesigned to create integrative action situations and what mechanisms may help to achieve this in practice.

itizens are critical actors in sustainable transitions. Via their (consumer) behaviours, adoption of sustainable practices and technologies, grassroots initiatives, local actions, citizen science, protest, and involvement in participative decision making, they entail considerable influence. Recently, there is increasing attention to collective citizen action, in particular in the domain of the sustainable energy transition. Community energy collectives, often in the form of renewable energy cooperatives, are a manifestation of civil society in the energy domain. They engage in agency to achieve sustainable energy goals, lower carbon emissions, and foster social innovation. They engage with local communities, target group persuasion and embark on complex organizational processes to develop projects. To tackle institutional inertia, renewable energy cooperatives take on experimentation and lobby for institutional change. This chapter presents an overview on how renewable energy cooperatives use their agency to achieve sustainable transition goals. It ends with suggestions for future research.

Evidence from academic studies that analyze social and institutional factors that influence success with community energy projects is scarce. To address this, we pose the question: What are the social, organizational, and governance factors that explain success with ‘local low-carbon energy initiatives’ (LLCEIs)? To answer this question, claims were first established pertaining to three groups of social factors: i.e. (i) those related to the LLCEI itself; (ii) factors related to the interaction between an LLCEI and the local community; and (iii) the presence of supportive governance settings and linkages with local government and intermediaries. These were analyzed using a variable-oriented cross-case design involving fourteen LLCEIs in the Dutch Province of Fryslân. Results show that there is a difference in the sets of factors that positively correlate with various measures of LLCEI success. Factors related to the LLCEI (i.e. internal organizational factors) correlate with collective energy projects and to a lesser extent with individual projects realized. Items related to interactions of the LLCEI with the local community primarily correlate with the customer base and to a lesser extent with individual projects realized. Finally, items related to the governance setting correlate most strongly with individual projects realized.

In this doctoral thesis I delve into the reality of citizen-based low-carbon energy initiatives in the Dutch province of Fryslân and strive to understand their success. In doing so, I focus on the factors in their direct sphere of influence, as well as the dynamics involved when they interact with their localities and the wider range of governance actors. Regarding the latter, I specifically investigate how subnational governments and intermediary actors respond to the emergence of these grassroots initiatives.

Local authorities know for some time from experience with partnerships with local communities in the area of sustainable development that the urgency of climate change increases and that citizens develop into an equal partner. The convergence of these two motivations asks for an innovative way of acting, in which the performance of local authorities is a crucial factor for the ultimate success of local sustainable energy projects in which citizens are actively involved or will be involved. This article exposes the ways in which local authorities innovate with policy for the support of active citizenship in the production of locally generated sustainable energy. The article also explores the barriers that arise. The authors analyse two cases on different levels of government; ‘The Energy-workplace’ (in the Dutch province Fryslân) and ‘The Armhoede sustainable energy landscape’ (in the Dutch municipality Lochem). The cases show that policy innovations crystallize as well at ‘arm’s length’ distance as in the direct sphere of influence of the (local) authority. However, innovation takes place by the grace of the space in the existing institutional framework and the political (and administrative) system. Formal guidelines (like policy or regulation), persons, and informal practices of the traditional policy implementation may hinder a productive interaction between (active) citizens and government.

Recent scholarly attention shows that grassroots civil society low-carbon energy initiatives increasingly become part of the subnational climate change governance landscape. Despite their potency in view of consumer-owned distributed generation and enhanced citizen influence in the organization of the energy infrastructure, local low-carbon energy initiatives (LLCEIs) struggle to become viable alternatives to the centralized, private oriented energy system. To further LLCEI development, support needs to build their capacities, alleviate institutional hurdles and barriers stemming from the fossil fuel-based energy regime, and open up the system for the uptake, acceptance or breakthrough of LLCEIs. Evidence suggests that so-called &ldquo, intermediaries&rdquo, form a part of the solution in addressing these issues. Despite previous attempts at analyzing intermediary roles and activities vis-&agrave, vis the development of community energy, the reality of the various roles and strategies intermediaries can employ and the support LLCEIs require to further develop have not yet been synthesized in a comprehensive analytical framework. This article aims to fill this gap by developing such a framework. We reflect on the analytical framework by evaluating the intermediary support structure in a specific case: the Province of Frysl&acirc, n. From the analysis, we conclude that the Frisian case provided modest support to the claim that intermediary support is effective in addressing the needs of LLCEIs as the strategies and roles observed represent a complete and coherent support structure.

The social dimension of the transition to a low carbon economy is a key challenge to cities. The establishment of local energy initiatives (LEIs) has recently been attracting attention. It is of great importance to draw lessons from best practices when LEIs have been facilitated by local governments and made a substantial contribution to greening local energy systems. The main research questions in this paper are: What lessons can be drawn from successful local low carbon energy transition cases, and which strategies proved successful to support LEIs? We have used analytical notions from the Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and grassroots innovation literature to analyze two best-practice cases: Saerbeck (Germany) and Lochem (The Netherlands). Data collection involved a set of fourteen in-depth interviews and secondary data. The results show that three key factors from SNM (building networks, managing expectations, and facilitation of learning) are of great importance. However, to a great degree it is also strategic, community serving, responsive, reflexive leadership and proper process management by public officials that spurred success, which would not have been possible without close interaction and mutual trust between local government and representatives of the local communities.

Recent scholarly attention shows increasing involvement of local low-carbon energy initiatives (LLCEIs) in governance and policy, in particular in relation to innovations regarding low-carbon energy and energy efficiency. The future perspective of active citizenship in the production of locally generated low-carbon energy is largely dependent on the existing institutional and policy frameworks and settings. Subnational governments, in particular, can have a prominent role in this process by engaging in institutional adaptation and policy innovation. The central research question of this paper is: In what ways do local and regional governments innovate in governing to respond to the emergence of LLCEIs? The research question is answered by comparing two case studies: the Dutch regions of Overijssel and Fryslân. We have conceptualized a meta-governing approach of experimentation, characterizing the innovations in governing that emerge when governments respond to the emergence of LLCEIs. We specifically focus on two capacities that subnational governments can use to enhance their governing capacity vis-à-vis LLCEIs and which substantiate the experimental meta-governance mode: institutional adaptation and policy innovation. We then formulated hypotheses that specify the expected policy innovations and institutional adaptations employed vis-à-vis LLCEIs. Data collection involved in-depth interviews and use of secondary data. The results show that a balancing process of authoritative and enabling modes of governing particularly characterized the type of policy innovations that were developed and the institutional adaptations that took place. Both provinces govern LLCEIs at arm’s length and issue significant capacity-building strategies that vary in terms of their conditions. Municipalities, however, incline towards impromptu and opportunistic responses, some of them having lasting effects by patching up existing institutional settings, others having more of an episodic character. The results will further the understanding of subnational low-carbon policy and governance innovation processes vis-à-vis the role of LLCEIs.