© Rainer Sturm / PIXELIO© Eva Kaliwoda / PIXELIO© Rosel Eckstein / PIXELIO© Uschi Dreiucker / PIXELIO© Uschi Dreiucker / PIXELIO© Berggeist007 / PIXELIO© Joujou / PIXELIO© Q Pictures / PIXELIO© Rainer Sturm / PIXELIO
© Rainer Sturm / PIXELIO
© Eva Kaliwoda / PIXELIO
© Rosel Eckstein / PIXELIO
© Uschi Dreiucker / PIXELIO
© Uschi Dreiucker / PIXELIO
© Berggeist007 / PIXELIO
© Joujou / PIXELIO
© Q Pictures / PIXELIO
© Rainer Sturm / PIXELIO

Work Package 4: Energy Governance

Addressing legal and political challenges in the governance of the Energy Strategy. Research will provide recommendations for overcoming situations in which the current governance impedes the transformation towards sustainable energy systems and in which more effective policies, regulations, and processes could facilitate the transformation.


WP4 identifies legal and political challenges in the governance of the Energy Strategy 2050. It provides recommendations for overcoming situations in which the current state of governance impedes the transformation towards sustainable energy systems and in which more effective policies, regulations, and processes could facilitate the transformation. The research of WP4 complements economic, financial and technological devices for energy transitions proposed by other WPs by providing ways to eliminate bottlenecks of the process.

WP4 highlights the role of a broad battery of actors, which are inherently heterogeneous in their policy preferences as well as their practices in handling, steering, and defining policies and markets. The actors analyzed here are also multi-leveled; some are nested state actors (municipals, cantons, and federal government), others are non-state and transnational (e.g. individuals, market participants, political parties and interest groups, industry associations, and NGOs). When analyzing the role of these actors, WP4 investigates not only formal procedures such as political and democratic processes, but also market behavior and societal practices. This allows to see how these practices feed back into the existing legal, political and economic framework, re-shaping the dynamic energy governance system. To this end, WP4 makes use of a variety of methods, from normative to qualitative and quantitative empirical methods.

The focus of WP4 is on the behavior as well as on the positive and normative framework of political actors, bureaucracies, courts, international organizations, lobby groups, civil society, economic actors, and individuals. It comprises the emergence of new policies, the enabling of such policies by use of legal instruments and procedures, and the implementation of such policies including their feedback loops. As a result, WP4 is essentially interdisciplinary and its tasks are interlocked in various ways. WP4, e.g., evaluates the social acceptance of energy regime transitions and analyzes changes in investor behavior to complement existing research findings from behavioral economics; it uses such results to make legal recommendations to adapt law and regulations; and it examines options to facilitate the political process to implement necessary changes.

 
Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society and Transition
In case of questions, please contact the Management Office
In case of questions, please contact the Management Office.
choose view for desktop and laptop manuallychoose view for tablet manuallychoose view for smartphone manually