Collaboration and Competition in Local Energy Transitions: A Case Study

Cities and towns in Europe increasingly pursue low carbon transitions. Actors from different social spheres such as politicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists are involved in these local transitions processes. However, comprehensive research on these processes that takes the various social spheres and their interactions into account barely exists. This paper contributes to filling this gap by presenting an empirical study on the energy transition processes in the city of Emden (Germany). Based on document analysis and 37 narrative interviews with local actors involved in energy transition processes, it emphasizes the collaboration and competition between actors from different social spheres. The material shows an increasing engagement in energy transition processes, which can be attributed to the benefits various actors can generate from their activity in the transformation processes, such as political votes, power, economic profits, publications and research funds, credibility, and moral legitimacy. Despite seeking different types of benefits and engaging in dissimilar operational logics and fields of activity, actors from different spheres tend to complement each other in their transition activities. Thus, actors from each sphere assume specific functions in the local energy transition: politics take favorable decisions for local energy transition; businesses “materialize” energy transitions in the form of wind farms and energy efficiency measures; civil society agents act as moral watch dogs; science provides scientific expertise to transition projects. While the local activity is mostly marked by collaboration, there is also competition for the dominant positions in local energy transitions processes. Conveying high legitimacy and sphere-specific benefits to actors (e.g., votes, economic profit) as well as the potential to shape local transitions processes, actors compete for leadership roles and seek to brand themselves as pioneers of Emden’s energy transition. The rising attractiveness of local energy engagement as well as the collaboration and competition between actors indicate the emergence of a local “energy transition”-arena, which constitutes a social field in which actors from different social spheres collaborate in energy transition activities and struggle for dominant positions.