The Secret Sauce of Successful Energy Policies: Unveiling the Ingredients for Citizen Support of Sustainable Energy Policies

The awareness of potential societal resistance and the time constraints associated with the expansion of renewable energy sources have underscored the crucial role of local acceptance of energy policies in facilitating a successful transition to sustainable energy systems. While the acceptance of renewable energy technologies has been increasingly investigated in recent years, explanatory factors for energy policy acceptance on citizen level remain underexplored. However, existing studies on the acceptance of individual policy measures found, for instance, that subsidies generally receive high levels of acceptance, whereas emission trading systems and especially energy taxes are less supported (Drews & Van Den Bergh, 2016; Rhodes et al., 2017). This knowledge is important for policymakers when it comes to advancing the transformation process in times or areas with lower levels of support for the energy transition and maintaining social cohesion in this political arena. To address the need for a deeper understanding of the multidimensional nature of acceptance and anticipate the reactions of citizens to individual energy instruments, this paper aims to provide a systematic literature review on the topic, extract overarching findings of case studies on individual policies, and further enrich existing theoretical frameworks. Previous studies suggest that past theoretical assumptions have been only partially valid. For example, the findings of Ziegler (2019) and Rhodes et al. (2017) support the hypothesis that factors such as personal attitudes and values (e.g. environmental awareness, altruistic norms, political identification) as well as contextual factors (e.g. trust in government, trust in renewable energy) influence support for climate or energy transition policies. However, their studies did not find that the perception of personal costs and benefits, as well as education and income, were significant predictors of support for climate policy. Based on these and other findings, theoretical assumptions need to be critically reflected upon and expanded to incorporate additional categories for future analysis, such as the impact of perceptions of the implementation process so far or the political context, including the ruling party and its discursive framing of the transformation process. Given that well-founded assumptions about citizens' assessment of the energy transition in general or individual energy policies have not yet been adequately integrated into energy models, while they represent a critical socio-political factor that strongly influences the implementation of energy system transitions, this paper contributes to theory building trough the development of social storylines (Süsser et al., 2022) and identifies input parameters for energy models, which can also be tested in future quantitative analyses. In this way, several research gaps can be addressed simultaneously and interdisciplinary cooperation in energy research can be further strengthened.