From niches to norm: exploring the potential for reframing the energy transition through renewable energy communities – a study of narratives and power dynamics.

Renewable Energy Communities (REC) are a distributed production model that allows various entities (religious organizations, small and medium-sized enterprises, citizens, local administrations) to join together in different legal forms for the production and sharing of renewable energy with social and environmental purposes. Through this model, energy users actively participate in the supply chain, becoming "prosumers" or co-suppliers of energy services. The community ownership of energy resources in Europe dates back to the early twentieth century, a period when citizen cooperatives in Northern Europe created electricity and heating distribution networks, some of which still exist today. Growing from citizen movements in the 1970s and 1980s in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, today community ownership of energy assets is recognized in the European policy system as an essential condition for an effective and distributed energy transition. Recently, the sector's evolution saw energy communities operating in a limited scope, until recent legislative interest recognized their potential role within the Italian energy system. Following the publication of MASE Decree No. 414 on 12/07/2023, RECs can connect to primary transformation cabins, thus enjoying a significant expansion of the territorial perimeter and potentially involving thousands of users. In this regard, the first initiatives aimed at generating positive social and environmental impacts and emancipating from traditional energy operators have already been launched. Historically, community energy initiatives have been used by citizens as a means of social innovation to achieve various objectives, depending on the priorities of the reference territories (Devine-Wright et al., 2008). For this reason, although RECs are a topic recently introduced in the Italian public debate, they have already attracted considerable interest in the literature (Szymusiak, 2015; De Vries et al., 2016; Gui, McGill, 2018; Koirala et al., 2018; Sokolowski et al., 2020; Hanke et al., 2021; Magnani et al. 2023), often associated with the conceptual framework of energy democracy (Burke, Stevens, 2017; Szulecki, 2018). Energy democracy is a concept with multiple meanings (Szulecki & Overland, 2020): it is at the same time 1) a process that through widespread initiatives challenges traditional energy sector operators, 2) a normative goal, an ideal to aspire to, not without some contradictions (Patrucco, 2023). The research focuses on the narratives of the energy transition, using RECs as a study object to compare the role of reframing the transition in the context of socio-technical regimes. Reflection on system transitions, in this sense, developed in the early 2000s and under different frameworks, such as regime transformations (Van de Poel, 2003), technological revolutions (Perez, 2002), system innovations (Elzen et al., 2004), and transition management (Rotmans et al., 2001). What these models failed to address are the multi-level dynamics concerning “technological trajectories,” in this case related to the energy transition: that transitions are never a one-dimensional issue but involve various actors embedded in systems of constantly reproduced (or contested) rules with social action (Giddens, 1984) and meaning construction. Institutional theory helps us by distinguishing three levels of rules that constitute a “regime” (Scott, 1995): regulatory (laws); normative (values); cognitive or heuristic (belief systems, agenda-setting). In a regime, therefore, which is not only technical but also social, actors are embedded in networks that, with their rules, shape the organizational, value, and cognitive forms of (techno)social reality (Van Dijk, 1991). These rules of action are not immutable but constantly negotiated. This approach, due to its flexibility, allows analyzing the established narratives of the transition, characteristic of energy regimes, and those “in the making,” characteristic of niches in this context, represented by the RECs. In this sense, according to the literature, narratives regarding the energy transition are still largely based on expert knowledge, technocentric thinking, and elite exclusivity (Loloum et al., 2021). Hence, the transition would be: 1) a neutral field, 2) an “expert” topic, 3) disconnected from the socio-economic conditions that necessitated it. Thus, it is still largely treated as a depoliticized topic. Depoliticization is a meta-governance choice (Burnham, 2015) that affects various arenas transversally, bringing the convergence of different preferences into a single cognitive construction of reality (De Nardis, 2017). In this case, the transition is commonsensically given (Fairclough, 1995) as a technical/economic matter or an infrastructural adjustment. The idea that it is just an infrastructural adjustment, that does not challenge the broader dynamics that generated global warming and made the transition necessary. This would strongly limit the effectiveness of a proper transition, in the sense that it remains mono-dimensional. Starting from this premise, the research develops along three fundamental directions, each associated with research questions: Narratives: What narratives of energy transition emerge from the representations of energy communities in political/institutional, media, and interpersonal arenas across different contexts? What are the tensions and the points of convergence between established and “in the making” narratives across these arenas (Niche- Regime dynamic)? Dynamics of power: Starting from the representations of energy communities, what emerges regarding: technocentric thinking, depoliticization of the energy transition, limited conceptions of sustainability, conceptions of justice, and more to find? What are the power relations in terms of cultural dimension, social/structural dimension, economic dimension, and technical leverage? Are these power relations transversal to the regime-niche dialectic? If not, how are these negotiated/reproduced at RECs level? Differences among RECs: How do contexts and material variables (both internal and overall) influence outcomes related to the symbolic construction of narratives and the social representations of RECs? To answer these questions, the research uses mixed-methods, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches (including action research) and a theoretical approach ranging from frame analysis to critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social representations theory.