Planning Participation in the German Energiewende – On the Relevance of a Context- and Process-oriented Perspective

Public participation never takes place in a vacuum. The German Energiewende serves as a volatile political field for practicing and testing participation in transformative energy infrastructure contexts. Factors such as intense conflicts and limited space for informal participatory processes require a context specific planning of participatory processes that reacts to timely dynamics. Social-science research has mostly described and evaluated participatory processes in a rather static manner. Based on empirical findings of the project DEMOENERGY – The transformation of the energy system as engine for democratic innovations, we argue for a context- and process-oriented perspective, which centers on a temporal analysis that bears methodological consequences, too. The paper discusses what such an analytic perspective comprises and what can be learned from it, demonstrated on the phase of planning public participation in electricity grid expansion projects in Bavaria, Germany. Using this example, we outline the benefits of a context- and process-oriented perspective.