Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Throughout the history of modern environmentalism, an insistent undercurrent of grassroots activism has experimented with practical proposals for sustainable development. In areas as wide ranging as renewable energy, agro-ecology, and eco-housing, grassroots initiative has played an important role in the development of sustainable practices (Smith, 2007). Demonstrations of grassroots innovation have been displayed at all the major conferences on sustainable development, from Stockholm in 1972 to Rio + 20 in 2012 (Ely et al., 2013). There has also been periodic interest in grassroots activity whenever it impinges on the agendas of policy elites, whether through the creation of programmes and centres for appropriate technology under the auspices of the OECD and other bodies in the 1980s, to Local Agenda 21 agreements in the 1990s, to interest in inclusive innovation currently (Smith and Ely, 2015). Indeed, international policy under the latter has increased elite interest in the grassroots markedly in recent years (OECD, 2015; Smith and Ely, 2015; World Bank, 2012).
Much high-level policy interest is instrumental: grassroots innovation provides an engaging means towards the end of development as understood by policy-makers. Interest rests in scaling-up and rolling-out preferred models of interest to policy but derived from grassroots initiative. Whilst not all grassroots innovation is committed to principles of sustainable development, this article is interested in an area of activity that does, namely, the recent flourishing of community energy (CE) initiatives in the UK. We see this case as emblematic for other instances of policy engagement with grassroots innovation and study it accordingly in this article.
Elsewhere, we have defined grassroots innovations for sustainability to involve networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom–up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved. In contrast to mainstream business greening, grassroots initiatives operate in civil society arenas and involve committed activists experimenting with social innovations as well as using greener technologies. (Seyfang and Smith, 2007; see also Gupta et al., 2003)
CE fits this definition of grassroots innovation. CE in the UK is an area of rapid growth in grassroots innovation, and where policy interest has recently increased. The UK is not alone. Experiences in Germany, Denmark, the US, and elsewhere all point to the possibilities for the grassroots to become of interest to policy-makers (Becker and Kunze, 2014; Hess, 2007; Jorgensen and Karnoe, 1995). What these globally distributed initiatives have in common, as with other areas of grassroots innovation, is commitment to place-specific, community involvement in both process and outcomes.
Policy interest in CE in the UK has reached a point where, on 27th January 2014, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched a national Community Energy Strategy. The Strategy signifies remarkable recognition of grassroots initiative in sustainable energy. DECC is accustomed to operating within energy ‘regimes’: the actors, networks, and institutions that understand energy as the commodity provision of gas and electricity; dominated by a regulated market of a handful of multinational utilities operating centralised energy systems; distributed to relatively passive energy consumers (cf. active energy citizens); and where political preoccupation focuses on coaxing investment in energy security and decarbonisation of supplies (Foxon et al., 2010; Shackley and Green, 2007).
Whilst policy support for CE is welcome, it nevertheless attends to developments in particular ways and makes certain demands that are key to our analysis. Hence the DECC Strategy is central to how we approach our empirical material. Given this situation, we ask,
It is our contention that current policy advances blunt the critical edge of both the practice and analysis of grassroots innovation. Taking the mobilisation of local experimentation in CE as our point of departure, our analysis draws upon ideas from the literature on niche sustainability developments within the context of prevailing socio-technical regimes (Hielscher et al., 2012; Hoogma et al., 2002). We extend analysis by exploring the possibility for a more critical perspective in niche development and provide evidence for the challenges and possibilities of this move in the case of CE in the UK. Our analysis consequently recovers critical potential in CE and suggests a new trajectory of analysis relevant for grassroots innovation more generally.
‘The following section, on theory, discusses the niche literature.’ An analytical framework is developed that proceeds through three distinct analytical perspectives: strategic niche management (SNM), niche policy advocacy, and critical niches. So far as we know, this paper is the first to bring this third perspective into niche analysis. The next section introduces CE in the UK and the DECC Strategy. Our methodology is presented in the fourth section, before analysis in the section titled, ‘Analysis: The development of CE in the UK’ section. ‘Discussion: Sharpening the critical edge in CE?’ section discusses how each perspective emphasises different relations between grassroots innovation and policy. The final section concludes by answering our research question and considering the prospects for more critical niche analysis.
Theory: Three perspectives on socio-technical niches
Innovations for sustainability, understood as novel product, process, or service socio-technical configurations attending to environmental and social goals, often perform poorly compared to the market criteria dominating incumbent regimes for services like energy. Incumbent regimes benefit from years of development and perform better, whether in terms of price, convenience, and alignments with infrastructure and prevailing institutions (Kemp and Rip, 2001). Viewed in this light, grassroots (and other) sustainability initiatives involve organisational forms, technology uses, skills, infrastructures, markets, and other institutional requirements maladapted and challenging to conventional regimes.
Research initially understood the development of sustainable innovation in strategic terms of providing niche protective spaces where practical development and growth render the innovation more compelling and competitive relative to the incumbent regime (Kemp et al., 1998). In recent years, this ‘strategic niche management’ perspective has been complemented by research emphasising the advocacy required to win policy support for niche development (Smith and Raven, 2012). In addition to this ‘niche policy advocacy’ perspective, we bring a third analytical perspective inspired by ideas for ‘critical making’ from design research (Ratto, 2011). Here, niche developments are not promoted solely in terms of instrumental solutions, nor convincing others such solutions matter, but rather in questioning regime conventions and debating the critical implications of sustainable energy understood very differently to the norms in those regimes. As such, our analytical framework consists in interpreting relations between policy and CE through three distinct perspectives.
SNM: Developing sustainability solutions
SNM analyses how experiments in sustainability improve the performance and spread of potentially transformative innovations through networking and social learning that reinforces positive expectations (Hoogma et al., 2002; Kemp et al., 1998; Schot and Geels, 2008). Niche growth proceeds through initiatives developing in a growing variety of locations, each informed by the demonstrated lessons and positive expectations arising from earlier initiatives, and including a wider variety of participants in niche networks. Intermediaries link activity and disseminate lessons through provision of an infrastructure of conferences, guidebooks, web platforms, business models, design, and service support (Hargreaves et al., 2013). The result is a process of standardisation and institutionalisation (including policy support, market creation, and infrastructure provision) around a more efficient and effective trajectory of innovation (see Figure 1; after Geels and Raven, 2006).
The strategic development of a niche through ‘global level’ intermediary activity (Geels and Raven, 2006).
SNM understands CE influence arising through the development of proven sustainability solutions. Niches are constituted by networks of local experimentation, facilitated and co-ordinated by an intermediary infrastructure of shared knowledge, guidance, and resource provision. Influence arises through workable knowledge taken up by an increasing number and variety of actors, which becomes increasingly standardised and institutionalised.
Critics claim the SNM view is limited and lacks political analysis and strategy (Meadowcroft, 2005; Shove and Walker, 2007). Criticism generally relates to unease over: (i) sustainable innovations seen as self-evidently desirable, and (ii) inattention to structural power shaping the terms of niche development (Smith and Stirling, 2007). In practice, ‘second-order’ lessons contending the framings and purposes of regimes and niches become eclipsed by technical, ‘first-order’ lessons that selectively appropriate promising niche innovations into incumbent regimes with little transformation (Smith and Kern, 2009).
Niche policy advocacy: Making sustainability solutions matter
More recent contributions have attended to the political dimensions of niche development (Smith and Raven, 2012). Smith et al. argue niche advocates have to do a considerable amount of political work to build supportive alliances for niche development (Smith et al., 2013b). Niche spaces have to be constructed through advocacy work that selectively represents niche socio-technical performance in narrative terms favourable to influential discourses in the wider social world. So rather than hoping for self-evident social learning about niche performance, there is knowledge politics and dispute over the interpretation and future significance of such performance, as well as arguments for mobilising support that will develop niches further. If successful, this advocacy work empowers niche actors by drawing in new participants, mobilising additional resources, and gaining wider social and political legitimacy as a voice that counts in reforms for sustainability.
A niche policy advocacy perspective sees influence arising through targeted lobbying that positions niche performance as something that matters for agendas prevailing in wider regimes. Explanatory emphasis builds on niche developments identified in SNM, but influence is attributed more to intermediary organisations mobilising evidence of improving performance and advocating in terms satisfying broader socio-political discourses. However, any commitments won for grassroots innovations in this way will bring agendas and criteria that shape future development possibilities.
However, the policy support and resources won through outward-oriented advocacy and discursive alignment contain conditions in their deployment. Particularly where support comes from organisations situated more powerfully in the wider regime, and who work to a different agenda, then conditional support can pull niche development towards that agenda and away from original aims (Clausen and Yoshinaka, 2007).
Critical niches: Unsettling and debating sustainability
Our third analytical perspective conceives of niche influence not so much in improvements to material solutions – the instrumental innovation of products, processes, or services – but rather in challenging prevailing discourses and shifting the terms of debate by generating critical knowledge (Smith et al., 2013a).
Here ideas from ‘critical making’ in design research become interesting for niche theory (Ratto, 2011). Critical making aims ‘to use material forms of engagement with technologies to supplement and extend critical reflection and, in doing so, to reconnect our lived experiences with technologies to social and conceptual critique’ (Ratto, 2011: 253). Critique is understood in terms familiar to Critical Theory: a process that makes apparent the social structures dominating an issue, and suggests actions people might take to liberate themselves from such dominance (Feenberg, 2002).
So in contrast with preceding perspectives, which frame the principal influence of niches in terms of instrumental growth, critical making takes a more antagonistic stance towards policy, and sees influence in debates engendered by grassroots initiatives that are unsettling towards regimes, and, ideally, help mobilise a more transformational politics (Hertz, 2012; The Corner House, 2013). Practically oriented sustainability groups can be wary of being construed as political. Nevertheless, all grassroots developments soon encounter impediments arising from social structures inherent to regimes. Influence is seen arising through the shared discussion, awareness, reflection, and points of action towards these social structures. Consequently, even grassroots innovations that ‘fail’ to scale-up have value so long as they mobilise critical insight: how choices, trade-offs, and social as well as material activity is structured, and how these limited freedoms for manoeuvre might be overcome in future mobilisations of political agency beyond the niche. It is the spread of critical insight, and transformative politics, that becomes the indicator of success.
Three perspectives on sustainability niches.
CE in the UK
CE projects involve a variety of sustainable energy practices, singularly or in combination. In the UK, these include relatively small-scale renewable energy projects – such as neighbourhood solar energy; projects dedicated to retrofitting energy efficiency measures – such as solid wall insulation in homes in a neighbourhood; activities aimed at supporting sustainable behaviour changes whether through publicity, support groups, or other means; and initiatives for the collective purchasing of sustainable energy. Organisationally, the groups driving this activity take a variety of forms, including formally constituted co-operatives, social enterprises, volunteer organisations, as well as informal associations of neighbours or interest groups (Seyfang et al., 2013a, 2013b).
Walker and Devine-Wright (2008) identify two distinctive dimensions to CE: the
Definitional flexibility in the UK has permitted experimentation into different varieties of CE projects. DECC’s Strategy adopts the looser and broader meaning under the Walker et al. scheme and expands it to include activities
Intermediary activities and examples in the development of community energy in the UK.
DECC’s Strategy builds on what it considers to be a wealth of real-world experimentation in CE projects in the UK. CE development has involved groups creating project opportunities out of uncertain contexts, exploiting resources and contacts to hand, and continually adapting to shifting circumstances. Research identifies what it typically takes to put a project in place, and how intermediaries have developed toolkits and guidance on how to replicate that activity (Seyfang et al., 2014).
So, for example, groups have to study technical information about different energy activities, constitute themselves as a legal entity, apply for grants, seek loans, raise money, think about insurance questions, permissions under planning and building regulations, marketing strategies, and so on; as well as the less technical, more emotional matters of sticking with a demanding project, having to work at maintaining commitment and good will (often voluntary) within the team in the face of setbacks; whilst simultaneously honing their negotiating skills with the various agencies and organisations that help provide all the elements that makes a project come together. The experience generates important social and technical know-how and which an increasing variety of CE intermediary organisations gather, support, and suggest how policy might be designed to help. Case studies and toolkits have become a popular means for codifying and sharing this knowledge. Figure 2 presents our analysis of 58 third-party case studies for the kinds of topic this knowledge focused upon. Most topics relate to practical matters of gaining community support, planning a project, and implementing it (Hargreaves et al., 2013). Wider policy and market issues account for only 5% of the lessons conveyed from case study projects, and as with other topics, these lessons were how to fit within the system, rather than challenge it.
CE project development topics covered in third-party intermediary case studies (Hargreaves et al., 2013).
The DECC Strategy gives an impulse to the development of CE based on co-ordinating, scaling-up, and rolling-out models that have worked particularly well for some groups. Prior to the Strategy, a series of policies going back to the early 1990s had provided limited opportunities for CE development. Support ranged from the provision of advice services under the Community Renewables Initiative for a short period in certain regions of England, to £10 m worth of grants for 22 flagship CE pilot projects under the Low Carbon Communities Programme. There were also various general-purpose grant-funding programmes, such as Clear Skies, available for smaller scale energy supply and demand reduction measures that community groups could bid into (for a good account of this policy history see Walker et al., 2013).
Policy measures were often uncoordinated, poorly designed, hurriedly implemented, and truncated (Walker, 2008). CE groups have had to be very nimble, entrepreneurial, and resilient in seizing opportunities amidst a shifting policy landscape (Seyfang et al., 2014). Groups and intermediary organisations had repeatedly to overcome setbacks as specific measures closed. Under this equivocal and uncertain policy situation, a piecemeal development of CE projects and supportive infrastructure took place
Introducing the Strategy, Secretary of State for Energy, Ed Davey, M.P. admitted that ‘for too long, community energy has been a policy footnote’ (Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2014: 3). He said the Strategy signalled ‘a step change for the sector’ unlocking ‘huge potential’ by providing help for ‘existing groups to grow and to inspire more to set up and expand’. DECC ‘want to enable communities and individuals to exercise real market power and add a further dimension to our wider energy market reforms’ (Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2014: 4). DECC envisages CE electricity supply projects reaching over one million homes by 2020 (Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2014).
The Strategy supports growing interest in partnering CE activity amongst energy utilities, investors, service professionals, non-governmental organisations, local authorities, and others in the UK. There are concrete measures: Ed Davey described the Strategy as ‘unapologetically practical’ and ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ (Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2014: 3). The Strategy includes new money for CE groups, support networks, a dedicated unit within DECC, the promotion of partnerships with local authorities and utilities, and platforms for sharing information. Leading figures from CE were involved in the development of the Strategy, which was further informed by prior research and commissioned evidence, as well as a public consultation.
Seen from a longer term perspective, the concrete proposals in the DECC Strategy are an attempt to bring some strategic coherence to policy engagements with CE. In this respect, the desire to learn from existing successes, but also difficult barriers, and implement an improved support infrastructure for new groups and future projects appears analogous to analytical insights coming from SNM. As such, DECC is becoming a significant intermediary and joining a rapidly developing field of actors dedicated to CE development. However, analysis needs to also attend to what experiences are being omitted by policy and strategic development, and that can complement SNM insight with a more critical sensibility.
At the time of writing (June 2015), a new Conservative government has taken office in the UK. The new Secretary of State for Energy, Amber Rudd, has attended CE events in the past and has expressed support for the sector. Indeed, CE has received cross-party support. Hence, whilst the Strategy was developed under the Liberal Democrat leadership of Ed Davey as Secretary of State for Energy, it was Conservative MP Greg Barker who was most visibly enthusiastic about CE as Minister of State for Energy. Moreover, as noted above, policies like the Low Carbon Communities Programme under the Labour government helped in the development of the sector. Outside Parliament and government, think tanks of various political orientations have promoted CE, including ResPublica and Co-Operatives UK.
For the time being at least, the Strategy appears to remain in place, though as with other policy areas, the Conservative government’s austerity measures are likely to bring deep funding cuts to DECC. Beyond reductions in direct support, however, it should also be noted that other areas of government policy have and will galvanise CE activity. One example is the further promotion of fracking for shale gas by the new Conservative government and which, in sites of exploration like Balcombe, has prompted not just resistance, but the development of CE initiatives as an alternative. Historically too, community action on energy has been motivated as much by inattention by government as direct support from it. So as party political and government attention waxes and wanes, grassroots action will endure, as will the issues of concern to the analysis here.
Research methodology
Community energy groups studied in depth (Seyfang et al., 2014).
The evidence gathered in this way was originally coded, organised, and interpreted for themes relevant to the first two niche perspectives (see Table 1). Specific aspects of this analysis have been published elsewhere: conceptualising CE as a niche, survey findings about the characteristics and aims of CE, the roles of intermediaries in CE, and how specific CE projects interact within niches (Hargreaves et al., 2013; Park, 2012; Seyfang et al., 2013a, 2013b).
However, as research proceeded, we noticed discussion in the field was tending to bracket out more critical questions arising from CE development experience. We do not mean evidence about the difficulties of doing projects, of which there was plenty, and where SNM and policy advocacy perspectives helped. Rather, we mean critical debate about transforming energy regimes so that they become more open to some of the originating aims of community involvement and control, rather than CE becoming an adjunct to marginally reformed energy regimes. Critical issues cropped up in conversations with practitioners, yet neither our framework nor policy developments were exploring them in depth. Practitioners rarely persisted in these issues for fear that it would not help their cause in seeking policy support. This prompted us to develop the critical niches perspective and led to us going back through our empirical material to apply and test this new perspective.
Analysis: The development of CE in the UK
In this section, we consider the development of CE through each of our analytical perspectives.
The strategic niche management of CE
In consulting about its Strategy, DECC (2013) sought evidence about the benefits of CE in terms of: tailoring energy solutions to local needs; engaging people in energy issues; how CE brings local economic, social, and health benefits; and CE contributions to community cohesion and vitality. DECC also wanted to understand the barriers to developing more CE, whether through replication of initiatives, scaling-up, or hybrid forms of energy partnership with business, local government, or the third sector. Finally, DECC invited information about solutions for overcoming these barriers and growing the CE sector.
SNM analysis argues the Strategy has only become possible because a CE niche developed that offers practical and credible energy solutions. There is considerable evidence for the accumulation of practical knowledge and technical experience in CE over the years (Hargreaves et al., 2013). The facility with which CE initiatives can be developed, and their scope, has improved considerably. And as a result, CE does provide helpful solutions for policy-makers and utilities concerned about the challenges of sustainable energy.
The ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ tone celebrated by the Secretary of State for Energy when launching DECC’s Strategy has been a hallmark of the practical attitude amongst CE groups. Initiatives have concentrated on the technical, organisational, and financial travails of making CE projects work. A growing number of intermediary organisations facilitate work between groups and provide support services for their projects (Hargreaves et al., 2013).
A key task of intermediary networking has been the collection and dissemination of practical knowledge about CE. Information has been gathered into a variety of online repositories about the different kinds of CE projects; how to do them; how they organise, operate, and perform. The benefits of CE as well as the challenges confronting its development are reported (Hargreaves et al., 2013). Conferences, events, newsletters, and online forums share and distribute these materials. Such knowledge has also been turned into handbooks, guidance, and toolkits for taking groups through the process of creating a CE initiative. Mentoring programmes have been established. Web-based knowledge repositories pull together case studies and online tools like carbon footprint calculators. Other sites contain news bulletins, survey results on the development of the sector, and step-by-step toolkits that outline in detail particular project-related activities.
Intermediaries operate at different local, regional, and national scales. Some receive core funding to help administer public grants and programmes, some rely on funding from public agencies for specific projects to support CE, other intermediation works through more grassroots, voluntary associations between networks of CE groups. Dedicated investment funds have been established, access to legal advice, accounting services, and independent technical advice. The numbers of organisations offering services for CE have increased. In addition, staff in utility companies, Ofgem (the energy markets regulator), DECC, the Scottish government, Welsh Assembly, local authorities, and other bodies are increasingly engaging with CE.
More established CE groups have been scaling-up their activities and professionalising their operations, in some cases becoming an influential voice advocating for CE (Seyfang et al., 2013a). Partnerships are being forged with utilities. Such professionalisation and scaling, increasingly through social enterprise models, is seen as a promising avenue for developing CE. Combined with the toolkits, knowledge resources, and other niche infrastructure it is resulting in standard models for rolling out CE.
From this perspective, therefore, CE is considered influential through furnishing appropriable solutions for policy-makers to promote, utility companies to partner, and new social enterprises to undertake. The Strategy acknowledges and supports this activity. Amongst the first initiatives after the launch of the Strategy has been DECC sponsorship of a mentoring scheme between established and prospective CE groups. Other initiatives include creation of a Shared Ownership Task Force with representatives from the renewable energy industry and CE sector, as well energy regulator Ofgem developing policy in non-traditional business models.
All this activity provides evidence that supports an SNM perspective on recent developments. The DECC Strategy draws lessons from earlier CE experimentation, it supports further networking, and is articulating positive expectations for a growing CE sector. However, what this perspective overlooks is evidence for the activities that led to the current interest in strategically supporting CE. In successfully making their bids for funding and support, CE groups have always had to be adept at positioning and highlighting their projects in terms that spoke to wider policy and funder agendas. Historically, CE in the UK has involved groups reading between the lines of more general policies to identify hooks for CE to be presented as a promising solution (Seyfang et al., 2013a, 2013b). But how did CE itself become the policy agenda?
Niche policy advocacy for CE
Coalitions of groups advocating for CE have developed over time. Coalitions now include think tanks, utilities, investors, politicians, local authorities, housing associations, environmentalists, network operators, researchers, the co-operative movement, and others. Recognition in DECC’s Strategy was won through the organisation of policy-oriented events, production of reports, and lobbying that argued the benefits of CE in terms relevant to a variety of shifting policy commitments in government. These commitments included some specific to energy, most notably promoting low carbon energy, energy demand reduction, and opening energy markets to smaller competitors; as well as more general policy commitments to civic governance and local economic regeneration.
As such, intermediary organisations, and now including the DECC Strategy, have had to undertake the political task of developing credible and compelling narratives about how well CE is performing in terms attractive to existing policy agendas and future policy aims. Moreover, the promise of CE becoming a trusted, grassroots conduit for government sustainability initiatives in energy efficiency (e.g. boosting up take of the Green Deal); or as social enterprises growing in competitive strength, appeals to DECC agendas for opening energy markets; just as reductions in energy demand and increases in renewables appeal to carbon emission obligations; or mobilising community support appealed to earlier Big Society and New Localism agendas when they were politically salient in government.
Since as far back as 2010, sympathetic civil servants at DECC have recommended CE develops a more coherent voice through the creation of representative bodies. Such bodies enable DECC and other agencies to communicate more easily with the sector. In large measure, this is what has happened. CE umbrella bodies have formed and advocated for CE policy. These bodies have responded to policy consultations on behalf of the sector, and leading figures have participated in the Community Energy Contact Group created by DECC to develop its Strategy. Similarly, CE representative bodies help other groups to engage with the CE sector, such as utilities when thinking about partnerships with trusted organisations, professionals offering technical services, and local authorities and others wanting to learn more about CE.
The niche policy advocacy perspective highlights how influence has been won by skilfully aligning CE performance with prevailing policy discourses, utility needs, and local authority interest. Advocates developed legitimacy by pointing to performance measures consistent with salient policy discourses, e.g. around rising energy bills, climate change, and energy security, and to which policy responded. However, this mutual accommodation reaches its limits over more challenging issues of opening markets, re-distributing investment, re-scaling infrastructure planning, and other changes that decentralise energy regimes. The response to DECC’s Strategy across the CE community has been a mixture of gratitude for policy recognition but disappointment in the extent of its support. In responding to the Strategy, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Sustainable Energy (a leading national charity committed to sustainable energy) argued that decentralising institutional reforms ‘will demand a far wider coalition of interests to push it forwards than was assembled to help secure these first few steps [in the DECC Strategy]’ (Roberts, 2014). The critical question is how those coalescing interests will decentralise the energy regime and/or transform CE itself. Not everyone in the field wishes CE influence to be won through further scaling, professionalisation, and alignments with conventional energy policy discourses. Critical voices are concerned that CE developments are narrowing rather than improving community involvement, and making what involvement there is instrumental to energy policy, rather than transforming energy systems. As a result, space for debating energy alternatives and community development objectives diminishes. It is this evidence that becomes more apparent under the critical niches perspective.
Critical niches unsettling energy regimes?
Objectives of CE projects (Seyfang et al. 2013b).
The reasons groups form around sustainable energy do not line up comprehensively with policy aims. Whilst overlaps make DECC Strategy possible, there are also differences that beg questions about the way the Strategy perceives community interest in energy and future pathways for sustainable energy. As a recent report from The Corner House, a research group committed to environment and social justice, argues: They [local communities] are far from indifferent to technical issues – for example, how to learn about, develop, experiment with, install and pay for wind technology – but tend to understand the development of technology as entwined from the outset with issues of local democracy, local concerns, exploitation, and, often, local resistance to the energy projects that the state consistently seeks to justify on economic grounds. (The Corner House, 2013: 25)
In other cases, we found CE projects identifying limits to changing energy systems through voluntary action. Initiatives creating mutual support groups helping participants reduce personal energy demand and carbon emissions, for instance, found their ability to go beyond certain levels through individual action to be constrained by wider infrastructures for housing, mobility, energy, food, and water. The energy and carbon designed into these infrastructures provoked reflections on the systemic causes of energy demand and carbon emissions, and questions for policies that individualise responsibilities rather than mobilise collective responses (Hielscher, 2013). The critical point arises when confronting the limitations of (worthwhile) CE projects, and realising the significance of wider material and social structures affecting sustainability.
The overarching question, however, is how strategies for mobilising this critical knowledge into politics resisting incumbent regimes and their designs for the future. Discussions on critical issues were evident in events we attended, yet feature neither in the toolkits developed by intermediaries, nor in policy strategies (Seyfang et al., 2013a). Examples of absences included, what is meant by ‘community’ and questions of inclusion and exclusion in groups; the social justice of utilities enclosing local renewable resource commons; the technical narrowness of funding criteria and performance indicators (cf. any cultural significance in CE); or debate about the political economies responsible for energy-intensive infrastructures. These are difficult issues to raise for CE groups seeking official support, even if many initiatives are motivated by more transformational objectives (Murphy and Smith, 2013; Seyfang et al., 2014). This points to another critical insight, about the material basis of energy policy discourse.
Analysis commissioned by DECC prior to the Strategy, and drawing upon CE databases, did find CE projects to be distributed fairly evenly across the least to the most deprived areas of England (Scotland and Wales were not analysed). The urban–rural split was also quite even (Databuild Research & Solutions, 2013: 25–26). Encouraging as this is, it is unclear what the specific community processes and outcomes are for the 2627 projects that could be postcoded in this way. The continued use of a broad and flexible definition in the Strategy leaves open questions about the community development involved. Our research found policy towards CE makes a number of assumptions about the baseline interests and capacities that groups need in order to engage in the support offered. Eligibility includes presumptions about neighbours, say, meeting criteria as a legally constituted group, or being able to articulate aims according to the criteria and standards expected of good application writing, or being able to convene more powerful partners into a project and meet their expectations (Park, 2012).
CE projects in the UK, like those elsewhere (Radtke, 2014), tend to be led by committed people with high levels of formal education. Reaching out to people from a wider variety of class, ethnicity, and other demographic and socio-economic backgrounds, where requisite capabilities are oriented to priorities other than sustainable energy, poses a challenge that goes right to the heart of economic and social issues in society (Johnson and Hall, 2014). Even small things, such as utility partners calling meetings during office hours, or holding them in London, far from many communities (as we found in our case studies), become discussion points about failing to appreciate community realities and insensitivity to the voluntarism and free labour involved.
Critical evidence should inform debate about the meanings, limitations, and expansion of community involvement in energy transitions, currently and in future. Community development insight could inform the forms of participation required, and whether they become even more difficult under policy engaging communities too instrumentally in the scaling-up of model energy partnerships (Eadson and Foden, 2014; Walker et al., 2010). It is striking how lightly the Strategy touches on questions of community development and social purpose. Whilst diffuse social benefits from CE projects are acknowledged in the Strategy, they are dismissed as difficult to quantify and attribute systematically and comparably, and so are not afforded the same consideration as financial, energy, and emissions monitoring.
Not all CE projects wish to scale-up and correct the failures of incumbent energy regimes. Community activism borne of frustration with energy regimes can be considered symptomatic of problems with centralised, corporate energy systems, and where institutional reforms to decentralise and democratise energy services would be welcomed. The critical niches perspective highlights experiences provoking debate about what energy is for in society and how citizens are involved (Shove and Walker, 2014).
Discussion: Sharpening the critical edge in CE?
Niche analysis of community energy in the UK.
Local experiments
Under SNM, CE projects are understood to demonstrate the practical viability of community forms of energy. The emphasis is on working projects providing energy benefits. Projects bring together technical, organisational, administrative, and financial elements into a working configuration. Projects learn from one another and improve performance over time. Public policy drew selectively from years of experience configuring CE in the UK. However, policy interest in CE is not automatic. It arises through lobbying and niche policy advocacy. Advocates emphasise evidence that aligns with salient policy discourses and which, over time, lead to policies whose expectations shape further prospects. What gets overlooked is the critical implications of CE projects for wider energy regimes and even institutions in society and economy. The critical niches perspective understands CE projects as provoking debate about these social and economic issues, such as the decentralisation and democratisation of energy regimes, or inequalities that affect participation in community projects.
Knowledge priorities
Knowledge about CE is different under each perspective. SNM focuses upon the codification and dissemination of practical knowledge relevant to the doing of CE projects: technical, legal, financial, organisational, and motivational knowledge. The niche policy advocacy perspective emphasises two forms of knowledge relating to insights arising from SNM. First is knowledge about the energy, environment, or social performance of CE projects. Second is knowledge about tractable barriers to the successful development of more CE projects. For both, political skill is required in using evidence persuasively for policy. What tends to get left out in these processes, and which the critical niches perspective emphasises, is the knowledge generated about more challenging issues, such as ambiguities about the form and depth of community involvement in CE, or the structural impediments to radically transformed energy regimes, or the way that policy attention prioritises certain performance criteria over others.
Niche intermediation
Under SNM, intermediaries gather knowledge and provide services that make it easier for other groups to develop CE projects. Case studies, toolkits, and advisory services are popular forms of intermediation. With niche policy, advocacy intermediaries create networks and advocacy groups whose target audience is policy. Events are organised, lobbying undertaken, representative voices articulated. Case studies demonstrate the benefits of CE for policy agendas, and insight into CE is presented in ways that call for reasonable support or help. Whilst policy advocacy and SNM intermediation overlap, the former requires the mobilisation of additional actors, such as think tanks, utilities, and, as we see with the Strategy, brings supportive government actors in too. Each brings agendas to the common ground that needs to be advanced. The power relations in play, and compromises that are struck, become evident; something that intermediation for critical niches makes more apparent. Critical intermediation is the least developed in terms of an infrastructure of organisations, networks, activities, and materials that challenge the deeper structures underpinning energy regimes and that CE projects reveal. The actors, activities, and audiences are different: organisations that convene spaces for critically constructive deliberation; activities that support reflection on challenging issues and capable of imagining energy and society differently; and audiences amenable to critical insight and mobilisation (Light, 2014; Smith and Seyfang, 2013; Wilkie et al., 2014).
Politics
SNM presumes a singularly rational form of politics: every one learns the same, self-evident lessons. Consensus exists over the sustainable energy problem framing, which is that CE is beneficial, and policy will develop on the basis of evidence about the way to do CE better. Politics under niche policy advocacy takes a pluralistic approach in arguing why CE matters to policy-makers. CE analysed from this perspective identifies the work necessary to convince policy-makers that CE relates to their agendas. Arguments advance by drawing upon evidence from practical CE experience. Reforms can be pushed pragmatically; they should not depart radically from what prevailing regimes deem reasonable. Critical niches, in contrast, see reason in demanding the impossible. That is, they point to limitations under current policy discourse and seek to mobilise for something more transformative. The critical niches perspective sees politics in much more antagonistic terms. It insists upon issues side-lined by the power relations in CE niche advocacy and the exigencies of strategic development. CE projects that are a poor fit or unworkable under current energy regimes can orchestrate debate about restructured energy regimes under which the same projects are very sensible.
Our analysis has found that much visible CE activity in recent years can be explained through the SNM and policy advocacy perspectives. They are perspectives that complement one another. However, as advocates seek to widen and deepen their coalitions, they will find themselves in a dilemma: whether a CE niche will exercise more influence by following a strategy of policy advocacy in relation to the energy regime or by seeking more fundamental changes by pursuing more critical approaches. Even if CE has developed in spite of policy, it has taken a form recently that speaks closely to policy expectations. The voices for CE that have been heard are those presented in terms of scaling-up through professionalisation and partnership, or scaling-out through provision of models for replication by new social enterprises – a process reinforced by the Strategy.
Welcome as these developments are, and won only after considerable effort and skill on the part of advocates, our analysis nevertheless makes clear why a critical niches perspective needs to also develop – precisely because advocacy and strategic action are proving successful. Under the critical view, the CE sector must seek alliances capable of complementing a flexible and sensitive portfolio of CE support with measures to restructure energy regimes in radically decentralised forms. A critical perspective leads to different kinds of advocacy and strategic development. It recognises community development processes as essential: such as the face-to-face activity, diverse and tacit forms of knowledge, expertise in local experience and history, solidarity through struggling to bring together the materials required to realise projects, managing conflicts, debating the purposes of energy projects, and ownership of issues and resources, as well as other understandings and capabilities generated in challenging projects (Abramsky, 2010).
Seen in this way, our three perspectives exist in dynamic relations with one another. At times, these relations can be constructive, such as the gradual ability of CE to seek reforms in energy policy thanks to the build-up of a practical track record. At other times, the relationships are uneasy. CE has to skilfully work across criticism, advocacy, and demonstration. Critical issues have to be introduced and presented carefully as points for further policy advocacy, e.g. pursuing more palatable themes like social inclusion in energy, cf. social ownership of energy. Intermediary organisations are adept at pushing policy-makers each time for a bit more, whilst at the same time remaining reliable carriers of solutions for current policy.
Ultimately, a critical niches perspective refuses to side-step profound issues arising from practical CE projects that are unpalatable to regimes. It is a difficult position to maintain, since responses to critical insights can appear unrealistic in the short term, or even be taken as failures in CE, and thereby harm its credibility, when really these are issues that challenge the inability of energy regimes to support democratic involvement in energy transitions. A critical niches perspective looks to CE initiatives as embodying a material critique of energy regimes that calls for alternative discourses about energy in society. Yet, whilst critical niche analysis can bring deeper issues to the surface, it remains unclear just how this insight will subsequently mobilise material influence. Arguably, project-oriented CE initiatives have limitations in terms of lacking the organisational and economic resources to drive through the implementation of critical insights. One should not be naïve over the facility with which participant re-conceptualisations can be carried through into public discourse and everyday practices. Moreover, CE has weak institutional links to the kind of structural changes required for deeper-seated transformations (Hillgren et al., 2011).
Practitioners and intermediaries are aware of critical issues. However, they also rely on opportunities provided by energy regimes: funding mechanisms effectively frame and shape CE initiatives. This raises important methodological implications. Had we limited research to a single perspective and method, such as a survey of SNM processes, we would not have picked up the more guarded critical voices. Working between perspectives with multiple methods meant, for example, that critical issues identified during participant observation at an event, could be pursued in one of our workshops, and become a question in interviews. Multiple methods enabled us to return to developments through different analytical perspectives and, especially for critical niches, notice evidence marginal in many toolkits and intermediary support, and absent in the DECC Strategy.
Conclusions
Our question was:
As CE develops along a trajectory that allows it to win influence from policy-makers and energy utilities, so it takes on more professionalised, micro-utility, and energy service forms. As CE changes further through partnerships, hybrid models, and attempts to scale (Strachan et al., 2015), it becomes important not to lose sight of what CE has done well and does differently, such as explorations of alternative values for developing energy in society and working on issues of community development. A critical niches perspective helps keep in view the more challenging pathways for sustainable energy transformations.
Curiously, the critical niches perspective links back to some original features in SNM. SNM was conceived as convening space for experimentation that valued different cognitive frames and conceptual assumptions, and some of the more critical implications of niches for prevailing institutions. Application of SNM since then, however, has tended to emphasise the more pragmatic, technical lessons about how to make sustainable innovations fit into and better conform with prevailing regimes (Raven et al., 2015). Calls for radical rethinking will always struggle when criticising the social structures reproducing vested economic interests, positions of political authority, cultural privileges, social norms, technological designs, and research agendas.
Nevertheless, retaining a critical edge is vital. In the case of CE in the UK, this means not solely focussing instrumentally on drivers and barriers to the evolution of the sector into micro-utility form, nor how CE initiatives might gain influence through closer alignment with the particular political imperatives dominating the moment. Rather, research needs to open up discussions about how CE initiatives embody new ways of thinking about and acting upon energy questions. CE practitioners might be understandably wary, and policy-makers institutionally uneasy, about such critical approaches. Nonetheless, our analysis suggests that making the most of community energies demands an agenda that looks beyond instrumental imperatives and explores how socio-political programmes can develop that are more transformational than those currently prevailing in energy regimes.