Sustainable energy in Italy: how rhetorical ‘short circuits’ affect individual participation.

Cooperation between policy makers, stakeholders and citizens is crucial to foster the transformation of current energy systems into really sustainable ones (Schweizer-Ries 2008). However, if attitudes and behaviours of individuals are often under the focus of attention, less space has been devoted to understand how policy makers and stakeholders view citizens and their relationship with energy issues. Nonetheless, together with technical innovation, public policies and debates affect community engagement as well as individual practices (Castro and Mouro 2011). This contribution aims at tackling this issue by exploring how sustainable energy has been socially constructed in recent years (2009-2012) by decision makers and stakeholders in Italy, at the national and the local levels. In particular we looked at sustainable energy as the area of an ideal triangle, on whose vertices are users, energy, and energy systems (Devine-Wright 2007), and we examined if and how this area modified along time. Data from parliamentary debates and consultation, as well as from semi-structured interviews, were subjected to qualitative and quantitative content analyses. Results show that societal discourse on sustainable energy are rhetorically oriented in a manner that precludes citizens engagement. These ‘short circuits’ constrain individual and community actions to the acceptance or the refusal of top- down decisions, and leave little room for community empowerment and bottom-up innovation.