Cultivating Shared Ownership: Empowering Communities for Agrivoltaics Adoption in Italy

Agrivoltaic systems, integrating solar energy production with agronomic activity, offer a promising avenue toward sustainable energy production on agricultural land. Despite its potential, Italy faces uncertainties regarding the widespread adoption of this technology. State subsidies support advanced systems, yet communication between experts and stakeholders has not yielded anticipated outcomes. Social representations theory can help us understand what hinders the adoption of agrivoltaics. In particular, we aimed to study the social representations constructed by agrivoltaics experts and local communities opposing agrivoltaics diffusion. Therefore, a mixed methods approach was adopted. A total of 40 newspaper articles published between 2021 and 2023 were submitted to thematic content analysis. Then, 13 experts in the agronomic and energy fields were interviewed to probe the strengths and threats of agrivoltaics. Findings revealed a disproportionate emphasis on the engineering aspects in scientific discourse, neglecting the potential contributions from social sciences. Newspaper analysis highlighted diverse concerns, including economic implications, environmental risks, sense of place, and regulatory uncertainties surrounding agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics projects were contested the most in territories that already dealt with different aspects of energy (in)justice, such as a lack of transparent procedures. Interviews echoed these themes, identifying pivotal arguments for or against agrivoltaics. Economic issues were differently perceived depending on stakeholders’ entrepreneurial innovativeness/conservatism; the impacts on tourism were discussed in terms of loss/enrichment of cultural heritage; insufficient agronomic experimentation referred to the passage/non-passage of agricultural machinery; the theme of land consumption depended on whether rural areas were deemed sufficient/insufficient for meeting the Italian demand of renewable energy; finally, the idea of threatened landscape led to a problem of familiarity/unfamiliarity. Above all, the vagueness of the regulatory framework concealed an issue of defining the sustainability/unsustainability of agrivoltaics systems. Engaging affected communities is imperative in addressing these interpretative nodes. Shared representations and community ownership of agrivoltaics are then needed to frame this technology as something more than a “technofix” for Italy’s energy targets, keeping in mind the complex nature of the social systems combined by agrivoltaics.