Engendering Clean Energy Communities

This paper wants to address inclusivity in decision making processes for energy transition communities. On the path to curb carbon emission to address the climate crisis, energy communities, that is community which organise energy production, are being promoted. The promotion of such communities face two main challenges: the first is to get beyond the resistance against the implementation (NIMBYsm) and the second is to have inclusive processes to get social acceptability of the energy project. The two challenges are complementary as a more integrative processes to implement an energy community has the potential to ease resistances against it. Studying three European energy communities, the research wants to test which kind of governance settings facilitate inclusivity in the decision making processes. The research question is: what kind of governance setting facilitate inclusivity? Does existing local political engagement determine or pre-empt engagement in the decision making processes of energy projects. What factors are at play which impede inclusivity, what factors help? This research fills some gaps in the literature. Research shows that there is a need for a more inclusive governance system to enhance participation in decision making process (Helbert 2021). Second while there is attention toward engendering the energy transition, this attention is mostly in the Global South (Clancy et al. 2020). Last, previous research on inclusivity and new clean energy communities advocates for strategies to engage women more systematically in decision making (COMETS 2022). To do so, the research is taking a conceptual framework made of intersectionality and polycentric governance. Polycentric governance is a bottom-up governance settings that allows for multiple mechanisms of collective decision-making and conflict resolution at multiple levels of aggregation. An intersectional gender lens is an understanding of the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power. The combination of these two approaches will try to respond to the following hypothesis: there is a larger political engagement of women at the local level and there is a larger engagement of women in environmental activism. So any bottom-up governance setting has the potential to be more inclusive.