Participatory Institutions in the German Energy Transition: Are they Innovative?

Energy policy has been a disputed policy field in Germany for a long time. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were huge citizen protests against nuclear energy. On the one hand, citizens challenged the rather technocratic form of decision-making for building nuclear power plants because they felt excluded from these decisions that affected their lives. On the other hand, they challenged nuclear power per se. They called for a reformulation of national energy supply by an increased democratic process (Hager 1993). In 1985, an innovative participatory institution – the so called Bürgergutachten - has been implemented in order to discuss goals of future energy policy. Against the background of these experiences, several participatory institutions have been implemented in order to realize the German Energy Transition that has been resolved in consequence of the Fukushima accident in 2011. From 2011 until now, several so-called citizen dialogues have been implemented. These were concerned with different topics like future technologies of energy supply or grid expansion. Despite these participatory institutions, implementation processes of the German Energy Transition like grid expansion or wind energy expansion are highly conflictual. Moreover, the overall acceptance of the German Energy Transition is decreasing. Against this background the paper will compare former and rather current innovative participatory institutions in order to analyze if there has been a learning process or rather a drop back in the realization of citizen participation. Finally, an innovative participatory architecture for the German Energy Transition will be developed