1.1 Interpreting Germany’s Energy Transition: The Need for Conceptual Guidance
The German Energiewende (energy transition) is attracting massive attention worldwide in both policy and research circles. The government’s spectacular U-turn on its nuclear policy following the Fukushima disaster in 2011 precipitated a raft of policy initiatives at national and sub-national levels geared to enabling full nuclear phase-out by 2022 by means of the rapid acceleration of electricity and heat generation from renewable sources (BMU, BMWi 2011). The rapid rate of change to Germany’s electricity system (see Chap. 2) is today, indeed, a cause of concern for many who feel they are losing out, whether in terms of lost markets, higher energy prices or intrusive wind or solar parks. A policy reform in 2014, in response to these criticisms, is likely to tame the pace of change and reduce organizational diversity, but the political commitment to the Energiewende remains strong at all levels and in all sectors of government. Germany’s own brand of energy transition will continue to serve as a model for emulation elsewhere or, at the very least, a source for learning about energy transition processes. As the German Advisory Council on Global Change puts it, energy transition pathways involve more than a mere shift to renewable energy technologies : ‘The transformation into a low-carbon society means nothing less than a paradigm shift from fossil to post-fossil society that must take place in the form of a societal search process’ (WBGU 2011, p. 8).
The Energiewende is being documented in numerous empirical studies appearing on the national and, increasingly, international market (Burger and Weinmann 2012; Gawel et al. 2014; Jankowska 2014; Laes et al. 2014; Solorio et al. 2014; Toke and Lauber 2007). What is largely missing from this debate on Germany’s current energy transition, however, is any significant attempt to shed conceptual and theoretical light on what is happening from a social science perspective. The Energiewende is having major repercussions on the political, social, spatial, economic and institutional configuration of energy provision and use in Germany—with potential implications for Europe and beyond—yet social scientists have, on the whole, been content with normative or descriptive analyses of the phenomena, strongly framed by policy needs and largely devoid of conceptual ambition. Germany’s energy transition, though increasingly discussed in the social sciences, has not yet received the theoretically informed analysis it deserves. Understanding the social conditions and consequences of the Energiewende, as well as the responses it is generating, requires conceptual guidance. There exists a variety of ways of explaining energy transitions in terms of theories and concepts drawn from the vast social science literature on, for instance, socio-technical systems , new institutionalism, political ecology or environmental politics . As yet, however, many of them have not been applied systematically to interpreting Germany’s Energiewende. Consequently, many of the phenomena being experienced there in the wake of current processes of spatial, political and institutional reconfiguration are inadequately explained.
This book is designed as a first step towards addressing this research gap, providing guidance for researchers in choosing, understanding and applying concepts from the international literature with which to interpret the societal challenges of Germany’s energy transition in a theoretically founded manner. Its ambition is to provide a review of relevant social science concepts, assess their respective powers of explanation as well as their limitations, explore possible complementarities between them and demonstrate how they can be applied in research of energy transitions generally, and the Energiewende in particular. Since almost all of the policy-related literature on the Energiewende is, with some exceptions (Beveridge and Kern 2013; Gawel et al. 2013; Moss et al. 2014; Jenssen et al. 2014; Strunz 2014), available only in German, the book is one of the first to provide conceptual orientation for future research on Germany’s energy transition in English.
Three overarching questions guide the research in this book:
- Firstly, which theoretical concepts and approaches are best suited to interpreting the reordering of institutional arrangements, socio-material configurations, power relations and spatial structures so critical to the trajectory of energy transitions in Germany and beyond?
- Secondly, what is the value of each of these concepts in describing and explaining energy transitions, where do their relative strengths and weaknesses lie and to what extent are they potentially complementary or mutually exclusive?
- Thirdly, how can these concepts be applied—individually and in combination—to enrich empirical research of Germany’s energy transition, to what scholarly purpose and to what effect?
This book does not aspire to create a new theory of energy transitions or to develop any of the conceptual approaches further. Its remit is, rather, to provide social scientists working on energy transitions with a compact discussion of state-of-the-art research on issues of institutional change, materiality, power and space. The value of the book lies in broadening perspectives on energy transitions through the lenses of selected conceptual approaches, comparing the analytical powers of each and illustrating how they might be applied in empirical research. From this it develops a framework for conceptualizing and analysing the socio-materiality and the political geography of energy transitions. It is, therefore, not a substitute for in-depth analysis of individual theories or concepts, but is designed to provide orientation for future, theoretically founded research on energy transitions.
The second clarification to make is that the book is not an empirical study of the ongoing infrastructural, social and political shifts of Germany’s energy transition. In response to the research gap identified above, it seeks to demonstrate, rather, how the empirical phenomena of the Energiewende could be more soundly understood and more insightfully interpreted with the help of social science concepts. Empirical examples of the Energiewende—ranging from bioenergy regions, wind energy development, energy efficiency in buildings, a waste-to-energy project to the remunicipalization of energy infrastructure—are drawn upon not as case studies, but as illustrations of how the concepts might be applied in empirical research and what they can reveal or explain. Case studies of energy transitions in Germany and beyond using the concepts elaborated in this book are currently being conducted in the context of a follow-up research project. The authors hope to encourage others to engage with these concepts in order to enrich their own empirical work on energy transitions.
1.2 Shedding Theoretical Light on Energy Transitions: The Case for Institutional Change, Materiality, Power and Space
Recent years have seen a burgeoning international debate within the social sciences on energy in general and energy transitions in particular. Recent reviews of this literature provide useful insight into the state of the art and guidance for research agendas (Rutherford and Coutard 2014; Sovacool 2014). In future energy research, Sovacool (2014) advocates the need to pay greater attention to issues of energy governance involving non-state actors, of inclusion and exclusion surrounding energy decisions and of scale in the design and impacts of energy policies. The debate on energy transitions, as a particular field of social science energy research (Strunz 2014), has been powerfully framed by the general literature on transitions. Transition theory has become one of the most influential approaches to study socio-technical change. It has developed out of a convergence of the theory of socio-technical systems within science and technology studies and evolutionary economics (Nelson and Winter 1982; Rip and Kemp 1998). Transitions thinking aims at describing and understanding how technological innovations regarded as desirable for a more sustainable society get established or resisted (Markard et al. 2012). Empirical examples span a wide array of topics, even within the energy sector , such as the introduction of a gas -based energy system in the Netherlands (Rotmans et al. 2001), the transition to fuel-cell technologies (van den Bosch et al. 2005) and mass pig husbandry (Elzen et al. 2011).
Transition theory is well known for introducing the so-called multi-level perspective which envisages successful innovations as emerging out of small protected niches towards wider application, forming part of a reconfigured, socio-technical regime (Geels 2002; Geels and Schot 2007). Beyond the analysis of historical cases of innovation processes, this body of research has developed normative strands for policy guidance, such as ‘strategic niche management’ (Rotmans et al. 2001) and a multi-stakeholder process of ‘transition management’ (Rotmans and Kemp 2008). This body of scholarship on transitions has generated huge interest in processes of socio-technical change and provided an appealing focus for analysis in the shape of the multi-level perspective. It has, however, been subjected to considerable criticism not only from within science and technology studies (Smith and Stirling 2008; Truffer and Coenen 2012) but also from the fields of human geography (Hodson and Marvin 2010; Bulkeley et al. 2011; Lawhon and Murphy 2012; Rutherford and Coutard 2014), environmental politics (Meadowcroft 2009) and environmental sociology (Shove and Walker 2007). The general criticism is that the transitions literature oversimplifies processes of change and excludes or overlooks crucial aspects. These criticisms are elaborated below in terms of fo...