Twisting like a cabbage worm
The politics of enacting sustainable futures through energy communities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7288586 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fredrik Envall (0000-0002-9108-9455, corresponding author), Johan Daniel Andersson (0000-0002-1979-2795), Johanna Liljenfeldt |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 166 |
| Pages | 104411-104411 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geoforum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104411 |
| OpenAlex | W7082265963 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 90 |
In 2019, the European Union launched a set of eight legislative acts called the Clean Energy Package, which introduced energy communities as a formal actor in its regulatory framework. Often defined as the cooperative production and management of energy through civic engagement, high hopes have been pinned on energy communities to serve as instruments for realizing fundamental ideals of energy democracy. Although it has been recognized that energy communities are fraught enterprises that involve multiple actors and cut across geographic scales and vertical levels of policy and politics, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the processes through which they take shape. In this paper, we approach energy community initiatives as sociotechnical configurations, examining how actors, technologies, and institutions are assembled, drawn into relation, and held together in collective efforts to shape the future. Our locus is two energy communities under configuration in the Swedish energy landscape: one part of a climate-smart urban planning project in the city of Örebro, and one in the sparsely populated rural countryside on the island of Gotland. By treating the configuration of energy communities as place-based enactments of sustainable futures, we illustrate how the prospects of community energy are shaped in practice and illuminate the composition of power that permeates the politics of future-making
Energy (signal processing · Energy policy · Futures contract · Legislature · Politics · Power (physics · Sociotechnical system · Sustainable development · Sustainable Energy · Electrical and Electromagnetic Research · Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping · Geological Modeling and Analysis
Challenging the “deficit model” of innovation
Beyond Cockpit-ism
Rethinking the multi-level perspective of technological transitions
From private lives to collective action
Energy Democracy
Negotiating contested visions and place-specific expectations of the hydrogen economy
Sustainability transitions
The multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions
New clean energy communities in polycentric settings
A politics of calculation
Wind, power, and the situatedness of community engagement
Rethinking community empowerment in the energy transformation
A systematic review of social innovation and community energy transitions
A critical review of energy democracy
Energy democracy as a process, an outcome and a goal
Energy justice within, between and beyond European community energy initiatives
Political power and renewable energy futures
The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions
An Energetic Odyssey
Transformative social science? Modes of engagement in climate and energy solutions
Ecologies of participation in socio-technical change
Reimagining energy futures
What is energy democracy? Connecting social science energy research and political theory
Typology of future clean energy communities
Between grassroots and treetops
Challenging obduracy
Value dynamics in energy democracy
Topological twists
Anticipating climate futures in a 1.5 °C era
Mapping diverse visions of energy transitions
The politics of making and unmaking (sustainable) futures
Governing time for sustainability
Four approaches to anticipatory climate governance
Understanding values embedded in offshore wind energy systems
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Grassroots innovations in community energy
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies
Governments, grassroots, and the struggle for local food systems
Carbonscapes and beyond
The politics of scaling
Assemblages of State Power
Att energigemenskapa
Containing the Atom
Emptying the future
Rescaling low‐carbon transformations
Introduction
Doing space relationally
The politics of imaginaries and bioenergy sub-niches in the emerging Northeast U.S. bioenergy economy
East‐Central Europe's changing energy landscapes
Critical research impact
The everyday lives of energy transitions
Community energy
Negotiating energy democracy in practice
Conceptualizing energy democracy
Participation in Transition(s)
Institutional capacity to integrate ‘radical’ perspectives on sustainability in small municipalities
Framing low-carbon pathways
Evaluating sustainability transitions pathways
Assemblage and geography
The politics of anticipation
Translocal assemblages
Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene
Scaling just transitions
Assemblage-democracy
Prosaic state governance of community low carbon transitions
Towards a material politics of socio-technical transitions
Heterotopia and the urban politics of climate change experimentation
Political ecology, variegated green economies, and the foreclosure of alternative sustainabilities
The Power of Constructivist Grounded Theory for Critical Inquiry
Regime Resistance against Low-Carbon Transitions
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |