Where are the citizens? Unravelling the lopsided nature of stakeholder participation in the Dutch regional energy transition

Abstract

In the process towards achieving renewable energy systems, national governments increasingly make use of regional governance arrangements that aim to translate (supra-)national commitments into actual policies at the local level. In this article, we investigate these regional energy transitions from the perspective of stakeholder participation. We clarify the notion of stakeholder participation by first distinguishing between citizens, and organisations from the three different institutional orders: state, market, and civil society. We argue that the extent to which the institutional actors are engaged in policy development critically affects the degree to which citizens can participate, also in later stages of the transition. We investigate stakeholder participation in the regional energy transition through a case study of the development of the Regional Energy Strategy (RES) in the Dutch region Zeeland. Using process tracing we describe the national guidelines on stakeholder participation, map the involvement of the different institutional orders within drafting the strategy and assess the role that has been assigned to the different stakeholders in the final strategy. Our case study reveals a dominance of actors representing the state and market and a relatively weak involvement of civil society associations in drafting the strategy. Citizens were not directly involved but were merely informed about the state of play. We attribute these results to the relatively open-ended guidelines that the national government gave as to the way stakeholder participation should have been organised in the RES and consider the implications of this for future designs of stakeholder participation in energy transition processes.