Are Local Electricity Experiments Sustainable? The Development of Situated Governance in Germany

Political decisions like the German Energiewende do not only symbolize a possible turn away from a fossil (and nuclear) fuel based energy system and the search for new energy resources but they also highlight that existing governance structures have to change, which coordinate the provision and distribution of energy, the development and diffusion of new technologies, property relations and investment decisions as well as regulatory frameworks and usage patterns. New, situated governance arrangements are being developed in a situation of high insecurity about the viability of respective solutions and arrangements. The paper will conclude that place and situation specific conditions for policies in the direction of a sustainable energy system differ according to specific local initial endowments and existing urban socio-technical energy systems and power constellations at a given time. In the process of developing climate mitigation related policies, a space specific specialization and division of labor can be identified. Location specific energy and innovation profiles (e.g. solar cities, bio energy regions, eco cities) with differing governance configurations become established. We assume that local governance structures develop in conflict with the field's established structures. Insofar the strength and weaknesses of the respective configurations as well as temporal aspects have to be taken under consideration in the analysis. Looking at the recent history of the field of electricity production and distribution, we can observe that initially a strong driving element towards the development of governance structures did come from community actors, civil society organizations etc. Meanwhile the field has become far more institutionalized and thus the developing governance structures are more strongly influenced by the attempts of big actors (public utilities, state and federal government) to streamline arrangements. Given the strong decentralized and instable character of the present electricity system the range of solutions developed in agri-environmental governance is still broad. It will be further concluded that the development of hybrid governance is especially supported by the fact that the practices to be governed are risky, complex, difficult to observe, weakly institutionalized, and unsustainable without social support. The empirical basis of the paper constitutes a structural analysis of 28 efforts to establish new governance arrangements for electricity production and distribution and the in depth analysis of four cases with different actor configurations and framing strategies.