Community Visions of Just, Clean Energy Transitions in Europe: How Emerging, Place-Based Narratives Contribute to Participatory Governance

Participatory governance is required for the European Green Deal to ‘leave no one behind’ on the path towards zero carbon emissions. However, this has proved challenging due to the policy’s technocratic, market-based, and individual consumer focused narratives of change in the energy sector. Ensuring greater fairness in energy systems requires that European Union policy recognise and support more diverse narratives of energy transition and participation within that transition. The concept of ‘ecologies of participation’ emphasises the ongoing relational, dynamic, varied, and co-produced nature in which people participate in energy, in structured processes as well as everyday activities, and suggests that climate governance and powerful policy narratives must recognise and respond to this diversity of participation for effective public engagement (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2016; Chilvers, 2024). In this paper, we explore how the participatory futuring practice of community visioning, which invites participants to imagine a desired future, can both reveal and shape ecologies of participation in energy, as well as inform how we understand and shape fairer energy transitions. We draw on the results of a social experiment on Clean Energy we ran within the SHARED GREEN DEAL project, where partners in three locations in Europe (Bełchatów, Poland; Granada, Spain; and Jaywick, the United Kingdom), co-created and ran unique community visioning programmes for energy transition in their localities. We compare these three case studies, which draw on 40 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with visioning workshop participants, facilitators, and organisers, and participant observation field notes from the visioning workshops. The paper shows how participatory practices like community visioning can help reconfigure place, space, and society in fairer ways, through eliciting diverse narratives of energy systems and transition, supporting participants’ direct engagement with the tensions and politics surrounding energy, and changing patterns and practices of participation. We also critically reflect on the relative power such participatory practices and their emerging narratives of energy transition have to influence the dominant European policy narratives and the implications of this for recognition justice.