Abstract
This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any given energy transitions case to identify mechanisms that constrain or enable accountability to decarbonisation with social equity enhancement. The versatile analytical application of these practices can advance environmental governance research on steering energy transitions towards sustainability. This chapter explicates seven cross-cutting dimensions and indicates how practices of legitimation play out within them in five cases related to energy transitions, drawing on contextualised examples from two cases for each dimension. This illustrates how practices of legitimation (discursive, bureaucratic, technocratic and financial) can reframe wide-ranging cases from diverse perspectives, fields and disciplines. Applied researchers can choose customised dimensions and enlarge this indicative set to identify situated mechanisms that modulate accountable energy transitions.
Highlights
Analyses focused on accountability relations can demonstrably construe a wide variety of cases in energy transition terms and pinpoint a range of accountability crises
It is possible to identify practices of legitimation that are at work to contest, uphold or produce new specific outcomes in relation to accountable energy transitions
Legitimation can become a clever and attractive but hollow performance, where new accountability relations to transition in a sustainable manner are not shaped for a different energy future, despite fanfare
Summary
Vehicle-to-grid systems for sustainable development: An integrated energy analysis. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
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