Boundary Bridging Arrangements: A Boundary Work Approach to Local Energy Transitions

Jens Koehrsen

doi:10.3390/su9030424

Abstract

Local energy transitions involve various types of actors (e.g., politicians, businesses, public administrators, and citizens) that differ in their objectives, values, problem-related perspectives, and professional jargons: these differences risk deterring the collaboration that is needed to pursue energy transitions as encompassing socio-technological transformations. Based on a boundary work-approach, this contribution studies the interplay of actors in these transitions. The approach suggests that boundary bridging arrangements (e.g., boundary objects, boundary settings, and boundary organizations) evolve in local energy transitions, facilitating communication across the boundaries between the various types of actors. In applying the boundary work approach to the energy transitions in two German cities, the article explores the potentials and limitations of this approach.

Highlights

It draws upon two case studies that were conducted in the context of a broader research project on local energy transitions
Local energy transitions involve a heterogeneous variety of actors such as politicians, entrepreneurs, researchers, public administrators, citizen activists, and consumers [6,14,26,27,28,29,30]
Local energy transitions involve various types of actors such as politicians, entrepreneurs, researchers, citizen activists, and public administrators. These actors are related to heterogeneous social worlds which differ in their objectives, structures, professional standards, and jargons

Summary

Introduction

National governments increasingly rely on local action, sometimes by actively identifying the key roles of local authorities and designing policies to boost local action, and other times, more passively by redirecting the question of how to engender the pursued national goals to local authorities [8,9,10,11]. This is paralleled by rising activities on the level of cities and towns (cf [6,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]). Municipalities, grass-roots movements, and local businesses often act as pioneering actors [7,8,10,21,22,23]: by encouraging transformations in their territories through experimentation, networking, bundling of interests, social learning, large investments in sustainable technologies, awareness-raising and other techniques, these local actors act as change agents and contribute through their micro-level activities to the national climate and energy goals

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion