This thesis investigates how smart energy experimentation arranges environmental governance in Sweden, focusing on the politics of such processes, against the background of an escalating environmental and climate crisis that necessitates urgent energy transformation. Empirically the thesis includes case studies of pilot projects in Stockholm, Malmö, Västerås, and on Gotland, and analysis of the policy landscape, mainly through text analysis and interviews. Theoretically the study takes a critical approach based on a Foucauldian understanding of governance. Concepts are derived from "governmentality studies" and science and technology studies. This approach aims to unpack experimentation as governance arrangement through asking questions about how governance is arranged beyond singular experiments, such as ideas and practices of achieving broader change beyond isolated experiments.

In this article unfolding processes of environmental governance are explored through the case of smart energy experimentation in Sweden. When experimentation merges with place-based dynamics, particular dispositions are shaped, with different implications for environmental politics. In accordance with other researchers’ findings it is illuminated how such dispositions tend to reinforce neoliberal environmental governance arrangements, whereas it is revealed how experimentation can also reconfigure governance. Attending to unfolding processes of accomplishing governance across a variety of spaces, this plasticity of experimentation is explored. The contribution consists of highlighting the situated dynamics playing out as environmental governance is produced across different places. This involves two analytical steps. First, disentangling some characteristics of experimentation as a situated disposition, through following how smart energy experimentation arranges environmental governance across the national Swedish energy and environmental policy landscape. The analysis highlights how particular characteristics of Swedish environmental governance molds experimentation into providing impetus for neoliberalization. Second, by zooming in two cases of experiments, elucidating the effects of the tentative and situated character of experimentation as governance is accomplished. Such analysis attends to the situated micro-politics of experiments, and how these can shape localized dispositions that refract broader neoliberal political rationality. Thereby the existence of a dominant ‘experimentation governmentality’, or disposition, is discovered, whereas situated experiments may always provide seedbeds of alternative forms of environmental governance due to experimentation’s plasticity.

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Implementing the EU Clean Energy Package (CEP) and its provisions for strengthening energy communities – the cooperative production and management of energy at local level by citizens, a concept emphasising citizen participation and empowerment – has opened a new arena for contestations over energy futures in Sweden. An aim of CEP is to contribute to just energy transitions through citizen participation and democratisation by using the potential of energy communities to reconfigure socio-material relations of the energy system. However, different actor constellations claim interpretative privilege about the role and importance of energy communities in a low-carbon future. To better understand political contestations over energy futures, we unpack broader discursive patterns and their socio-material enactments related to legally define and regulate the operation of energy communities in Sweden. Through the analytical lens of socio-technical imaginaries and technopolitics, we explore struggles over energy futures within conduits of institutionalised policymaking and attempts by energy communities to navigate technopolitical barriers in relation to grid infrastructure, power relations, actor constellations, rules and regulations and knowledge claims. We find that energy communities are not easily accommodated to the dominant socio-technical imaginary of Sweden’s energy future. What is at stake in processes related to the transposition of the CEP into national law is essentially different political ideas of how society should be organised.

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