• Energy Research

Energiamurros, eli siirtymä kohti hiilineutraaleja yhteiskuntia, joissa energiajärjestelmä rakentuu uusiutuviin energianlähteisiin perustuvaan energiantuotantoon, on käynnissä kaikkialla maailmassa. Tässä katsauksessa tarkastelemme energiamurrosta neljän käsitteen kautta: energiakansalaisuuden ja -demokratian, energiahaavoittuvuuden, identiteettipolitiikan ja reilun energiamurroksen kautta. Tavoitteenamme on tunnistaa ja tarkentaa näihin käsitteisiin liittyviä paikallisia jännitteitä nostamalla esiin suomalaisia esimerkkejä. Energiamurros näkyy suomalaisten arjessa muun muassa autoiluun ja asumiseen sekä elinkeinoihin liittyvinä muutostarpeina sekä uusina mahdollisuuksina osallistua energiamarkkinoille. Nämä muutokset tuottavat uudenlaisia, osin risteäviä eriarvoisuuksia. Energiademokratia painottaa energiantuotantoon osallistumisen ja ruohonjuuritason innovatiivisuuden kautta saavutettavia vaikutusmahdollisuuksia, jotka Suomessa ovat pääosin vielä esiasteella eivätkä kaikkien saavutettavissa. Uusin energiahaavoittuvuutta koskeva tutkimus osoittaa, että kaikki haavoittuvat ryhmät eivät myöskään näy politiikan teossa. Energiamurroksen reiluudesta puhuttaessa oikeudenmukaisuus ymmärretäänkin tulonjako-oikeudenmukaisuuden ja menettelytapa­oikeudenmukaisuuden rinnalla tunnustamisen oikeudenmukaisuutena, joka painottaa eri ryhmien kunnioitusta ja erityistarpeiden tunnustamista. Koska energiamurroksen toteutuminen kansalaisten arjessa näyttää myös politisoituvan, yhteiskuntaa hyödyttävän energiamurroksen edistämiseksi on kiinnitettävä erityistä huomiota risteäviin eriarvoisuuksiin sekä etsittävä keinoja vahvistaa erilaisten kansalaisryhmien osallisuutta.

Sustainability transitions require new policy pathways that significantly reduce the environmental impacts caused by, for example, energy production, mobility and food production. Transition management (TM) is one of the approaches aiming at the creation of new ways to govern transitions. It uses transitions arenas (TA) as a key process and platform where new policy pathways are created in collaboration with multiple (frontrunner) stakeholders. TM’s ambitious and demanding agenda is not easy to implement. There is a continued need for testing and developing new ways of carrying out its key processes. We redesigned the TA process in the context of energy system change in Finland by 2030, focusing on interim goals, mid-range change pathways and developing a new notation system that allows participants to directly create the pathways. The resulting renewed TA process results in more specific and detailed mid-range pathways that provide more concreteness to how to implement long-term transition goals. It helps to bridge long-term national visions/strategies and low carbon experiments that are already running. The Finnish TA work created eight ambitious change pathways, pointing towards new and revised policy goals for Finland and identifying specific policy actions. Evaluation of the TA, 6–9 months after its completion underscores that an effective TA needs to be embedded by design in the particular political context that it seeks to influence. It is too early to say to what degree the pathways will be followed in practice but there are positive signs already.

AbstractThe energy crisis that began in late 2021 and escalated after the war in Ukraine in early 2022 was seen as a disruption accelerating the energy transition in Europe. It forced households to save energy and change their patterns of energy use in a struggle to cut dependency on Russian energy, and in public discussions, various kinds of agency were required from and allocated to households. In this article, we analyze a total of 220 articles on energy use published in the main Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, during the energy crisis between 1 November 2021 and 31 October 2022. We investigate how household agency driven by the energy crisis is framed in the media by analyzing the variety of roles assigned to households and the framings of the agency attached to those roles in relation to mitigating the energy crisis. The analysis provides insights into how households are embedded within the energy system and whether and how they are expected to facilitate the energy transition; moreover, the article contributes to a better conceptualization of the understudied roles and agency of households in transitions.

Real-world laboratories (RwLs) hold potential for transdisciplinary research that considers the context of changing households’ energy practices. Taking into account stakeholders’ understandings of what would work where, how and why helps to recognize the contextual conditions for the transferability of RwL results.Reducing residential energy use and carbon dioxide emissions is a policy concern across Europe. One of the approaches to address this problem, real-world laboratories (RwLs), has recently gained prominence as a means to generate both sustainability change and social knowledge. Yet RwLs are context-bound, and transferability is an issue for scaling up change. Drawing on Realistic Evaluation (RE) and Theories of Change (ToC), this paper analyses researchers’ and practitioners’ views on the role of contexts and change mechanisms in the outcomes of interventions targeting residential energy use. The results show that extracting the underlying logic of RwL designs could help to identify where and when these designs are likely to be transferrable. This contribution has implications for the design of future RwLs, given that RwLs have until now rarely articulated their ToC.

Abstract Social innovation is increasingly turned to when attempting to address pressing social needs and emerging issues having a social impact because of its inherent promise for societal improvement. The aim of this paper is to explore, demonstrate and confirm the potential role of social innovations in contributing towards low-carbon transitions in the energy field. The study locates the adequate fields of intervention for energy policymaking for the support of social innovation through a multiple case study of six empirical social innovation cases in the energy field in Europe. We discuss the energy policy context of the social innovation cases and how they contribute to transition as well as their broader impacts. These cases demonstrate many positive effects including measurable impacts in emissions reduction, green investments and an increase in renewable energy production. The study shows that while there has been no general focus on diffusion, some social innovation cases have scaled up nationally and internationally highlighting the potential of transitions to social innovations on the system level. Finally, the paper highlights that legislative and non-legislative policies play a crucial role in the diffusion of social innovations as they are interlinked with administrative and socio-spatial scales and non-energy-related policies or societal fields.

Abstract Practice-based interventions have recently emerged as one way to question established practices and experiment with new, less energy-intensive ones within households. Yet, how practice-based interventions contribute to energy transitions on a larger scale still awaits to answer. The challenge is that practices are embedded in local conditions and contexts; therefore, scaling up is not simply a matter of multiplying or transferring particular solutions at new sites and larger scales, but it requires dedicated work to translate and support the local reinvention of practices. Drawing on insights from Social Practice Theory, Strategic Niche Management and Institutional Entrepreneurship, we build a conceptual framework for analysing the types of work needed to scale up alternative, energy saving practices in practice-based interventions. Based on the empirical investigation of six European practice-based interventions and the work conducted by the organisers, researchers, participants and stakeholders of these interventions, we identified three types of work to scale up: (i) proximate work to make the practice transferable; (ii) work to gain allies and resonance for the practice; and (iii) work to shape the conditions for scaling up. The paper serves as a valuable resource for future interventions, providing a framework for researchers and practitioners to support scaling up of alternative practices for low-carbon energy transition.