Sustainable energy and sustainable communities. Social representations and rhetoric construction of energy issues in Italy.

This contribution examines the representations of sustainable energy currently coexisting in Italy. In particular, we suggest that the representation of sustainable energy can be ideally conceived as the area of a triangle, on whose vertices are the representations of energy, of energy systems and of users (Devine-Wright 2007; Dobson 2003; Stern and Aronson 1984). Each of this vertex can be further defined adopting different parameters (i.e. economy, democracy, consciousness), giving rise to a rose of interconnected social representations (Bauer & Gaskell, 2008). From this premises the present investigation examines a) contents and field of the social representations of sustainable energy currently shared in Italy and b) the way this issue is rhetorically constructed by stakeholders and policy makers. The study has envisaged the use of a large textual corpus (years 2009-2012) extracted from Italian parliamentary debates and the national press. Public online archives of the Chamber of Deputies and of local institutions were used to search both sources. Full texts were searched using as criteria the Italian keywords energ* and sostenibil* [sustainab*], limited to the period between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2012. The text were then manually screened by the research team, and texts in which the themes of energy and sustainability were used in contexts different from the object of study were excluded from the subsequent analysis. Definitive corpora were subjected to qualitative and quantitative content and rhetoric analyses. Results show that, throughout the years examined, sustainable energy was primarily represented as a matter of economics and of national interest. Despite the interest on decentralised production systems, users are conceived mainly as consumers, whereas a true energy citizenship hardly emerge. The economic crisis as well as other political and environmental crises (the G8, the nuclear accident at Fukushima) introduced some changes into this picture, bringing to the forefront more eco-sensitive approaches, but new representations hardly challenge the hegemonic one. The rhetoric construction and use of sustainability and its interaction with the local acceptance of energy project will be discussed.