Building a “diverse economy” through the Renewable Energy Communities. Framing a new movement and reframing a public policy in Italy.

The paper describes the connection that is developing in Italy between the solidarity economy networks and the emerging experiences of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs). RECs are a model of distributed production of energy that allows different subjects to come together to produce and share renewables. The solidarity economy networks are a social movement born as a phenomenon of consumer activism from the GAS experience ("Gruppi d’Acquisto Solidale", solidarity purchasing groups), founded on the shared purchase of essential goods in the early 1990s and slowly evolved towards the construction of "alternative economic systems." Through changes in purchasing practices, political consumerism advocates for processes of social transformation (Boström, Micheletti 2019). Thus, a change in lifestyle becomes the initial step in fostering "diverse economies" (Gibson-Graham 1996; Gibson-Graham, Dombroski 2020). Often, food offers itself as a first step: as a daily necessity, it offers the aspect of individual consumption to be modified to build everyday activism eventually evolving into alternative food networks, true Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs) (Forno, Graziano 2019). Rarely do these experiences focus on utilities, such as energy consumption. The interest in this experience lies in two tensions, two conceptual redefinitions: a) the intention to operate a different framing of the experience of food activism and b) the attempt to reframe a European energy public policy to radicalize an energy transition that might reproduce the top-down logic of traditional energy systems and promote an individualized consumer-activism, detached from a systemic vision.