Analysing the Institutional Setting of Local Renewable Energy Planning and Implementation in the EU: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Due to the liberalisation of the European Union’s (EU) electricity sector, stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities in local energy planning and implementation are not well-defined in legislation anymore. To investigate what local energy planning and implementation processes look like in the post-liberalisation era we conduct a systematic literature review by addressing the question ‘which institutional settings of local renewable energy planning and implementation in the EU’s post-liberalisation area has prior empirical research identified?’ For this systematic analysis we conceptualised the analytic concept ‘action situation’ (as developed by Elinor Ostrom), from an energy governance and energy policy perspective. The literature review was conducted in two cycles: A systematic database search and snowballing. Four clusters of search terms were used to search two databases. The selected articles were coded using Atlas.ti. Our in-depth qualitative analysis revealed the institutional arrangements used in the reported local energy planning processes were found to not be ideal for the introduction of renewable energy technologies. No type of actor group seems actively to support the realisation of renewable energy projects. Moreover, a high dependence on financial subsidies was found. These results are useful for practitioners and policy-makers as they show which possibilities and limitations stakeholders encounter in the changed level playing field of local energy planning. The article also presents propositions for future research.

Social Innovation and the Energy Transition

“…12 of these articles concerned qualitative research methods, and quantitative research methods are used in 5 other articles. 3 articles concerned review articles presenting systematic academic literature reviews, leading to development of conceptual frameworks and propositions that can be of use in future research [50,60,64]. 2 articles used and analyzed serious games [50,59].…”

“…Insights are shared from Lebanon [45], Poland [46], India [47], Japan [48], Croatia, Spain [49], the UK [50,51], Portugal [52], and The Netherlands [53][54][55][56][57] leading to new perspectives on how social innovation is perceived in globally dispersed countries. Other contributions cover studies comprising of multiple countries like selected Member States within the European Union [58][59][60], countries within the OECD [61], or the European Union as an entity itself [62]. When we understand-and compare-social innovation in a cross-national, cultural context, we can develop a stronger and richer understanding of the dynamics that shape the policies and transformation strategies to foster the adoption of technological energy innovations.…”

“…Article contributions to this special issue came from a wide set of academic disciplines from the behavioral and social sciences, like law [49,62], psychology [46,50,51,56], sociology [45,53], governance and policy studies [54,57,59], economics [48,60,63], econometrics [61], anthropology [47,52], ethics [56], geography [55,64], and environmental sciences [58].…”

“…Lammers and Hoppe [60] present the results of a systematic literature review into governance and planning of local energy systems paying attention to several aspects, i.e., policy entrepreneurs, knowledge brokers, network and process management, boundary spanning, and end user involvement. They apply the concepts of 'action arenas' and 'institutional rules' from Elinor Ostrom's institutional analysis and development framework [75] to analyze practices of local and district level energy governance (i.e., planning and implementation).…”

“…More in general, there is a need to conduct future (empirical) research using conceptual frameworks that were conceived and presented in a number of article contributions to this special issue, like the framework on integrated community energy systems [63], the framework on regional governance arrangements [54], the framework on the relationship between people's values, the implications of energy projects for these values and people's emotional response to energy projects [56], apply the typology on intermediary roles in support of civic action (i.e., community energy initiatives) [57], and to test propositions on governance and institutions in local energy planning and implementation [60].…”