Investigating the transition towards renewable energies bringing together conceptual ideas from resilience and transitions thinking.
(c) Fre Sonneveld
Project team: Prof. Claudia R. Binder, Romano Wyss, Susan Mühlemeier
The production, transmission and consumption of green energy is key for the transition of urban areas to sustainability. Up to now, our urban life-styles, consumption patterns and mobility are largely based on fossil fuels. Fossil energy carriers still make up for (far) over 50% of the overall energy consumption per capita in most of the advanced economies of the world.
In our research, we investigate the transition towards renewable energies from two angles: the actor and the system. By bringing together conceptual ideas from resilience and transitions thinking, we investigate the actor-system duality and contribute to a better understanding of transition processes and their stabilization over time.
From an actor’s perspective, we focus on understanding change in individual behaviour, decision-making processes as well as on economic and political agency on all levels. From a system’s perspective, we focus on actor networks, energy governance and the assessment of long-term transition pathways.
I contributed to this research with my doctoral project –Resilience and agency in mature sustainability transitions: Theoretical conceptualisation and empirical analysis of actor- and system-level dynamics in sociotechnical energy systems–.
An Indicator-Based Approach for Analysing the Resilience of Transitions for Energy Regions. Part II: Empirical Application to the Case of Weiz-Gleisdorf, Austria
