Innovative Approaches to Energy Governance: Preliminary Quantitative Insights from the Literature

As recently reported by the United Nations, which is responsible for assessing science related to climate change, the climate is dramatically changing, and its impacts are already affecting our societies (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018). Thus, a disruptive revision of the energy production and consumption system is urgently needed. The energy transition can be characterized as a complex change process concerning the way energy is produced and consumed (Cherp et al. 2018). In fact, the energy transition involves at least two dimensions: the technological one requiring the introduction of technological innovations and the societal one whose impact would be limited or even potentially harmful if such a change would not be matched by social innovation (Domanski et al. 2019; Hoppe and de Vries 2018). At the same time, it has been widely recognized that such a process involves a change also in the governance of the energy system: decentralized energy systems need a multi-level and polycentric governance approach that embraces strategies at different scales, including, even if not limited to, the local one. In addition, non-state actors are gaining a central role in energy decision-making, like civil society, business, and local public authorities (Sovacool 2011, 2014). In this context, new approaches to energy governance are emerging, which can be described as forms of social innovation, ranging from energy communities to the design of urban living labs (Hoppe and de Vries 2018). However, a theoretical framework linking together and exploring the connections among the concepts of governance and social innovation in the energy transition is still lacking. By providing the first insights into the quantitative interplay of the concepts of governance and social innovation in the context of energy transition in the scientific literature, as a result of an extensive bibliometric analysis, this work aims to shed some preliminary light on the knowledge gap on the topic and to further inform the author’s development of such a framework, related to new approaches to energy governance in the energy transition. In this regard, it is expected to contribute to expanding the knowledge about new approaches to governance of the energy transition and aims to support the local energy planners in including the social innovation dimension in their local energy strategies.

This paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 introduces the key research questions and describes the method selected and used to perform the extensive literature review, including the quantitative bibliometric analysis and the qualitative content analysis of the identified literature bodies. Section 3 provides the results of such analyses, which are further discussed in Sect. 4, where also conclusions are drawn.

This study analyzes the linkages between the concepts of governance and social innovation in a context of energy transition in the scientific literature. Hence, the central research question addressed by this work is:

It can be further broken down in two sub-questions:

The first main question is answered by an extensive bibliometric analysis, while the following two sub-questions are addressed by an initial, mainly quantitative content analysis: the first one by digging deeper in the scientific publications looking for case studies; the second one by performing a keyword frequency analysis.

In general, the energy/governance literature body is the largest with 150 publications, while the other two literature datasets are smaller. The temporal analysis of the publication trends however shows (see Fig. 2) that the literature bodies “energy/social innovation” and “energy/governance/social innovation” are more recent. While the concept of energy/governance appeared already in the literature in the early 1990s and has gained momentum since 2007, the concept of social innovation in energy research emerged just ten years ago and is still rather underrepresented in the scientific literature body.

The geographical distribution of the three literature bodies widely varies, as Table 2 shows. The concept of energy/governance is researched all over the world, particularly in Europe and North America, except in South America. However, also Chinese and Australian academics significantly contribute to the scientific literature body about energy/governance. Such a worldwide diffusion reflects the long-lasting article production as illustrated before.

The scientific literature about social innovation in energy research originates mainly in Europe, where Germany is the country producing the largest number of articles, similar to the first dataset. However, energy/social innovation is also discussed in Asia (i.e., Japan) and South America (i.e., Brazil), as Table 2 illustrates.

Finally, even if the scientific discussion about social innovation and governance related to energy issues in literature takes place mainly in Europe and North America, contributions to it come from every continent, Africa excluded (see Table 2).

The citation analysis is assumed to identify the scientific literature that likely has had the most significant impact on knowledge. The ten most cited publications of the overall dataset obtained with the three strings are reported in Table 3. Overall, it includes eleven publications, due to the last two articles having an equal amount of citations. None of the papers belonging to the second sub-dataset are part of the list, reflecting also the limited size of the extent of the scientific literature’s discussion concerning social innovation. Interestingly, two authors appear more than once in the list of the most cited publications. Both publications do not address energy issues specifically. They focus on governance in relation to the urban environment and the concept of ecosystem services, in particular. Other papers rather more widely discuss low-carbon governance or integrate different topics (e.g., integrated water resource management, sustainability, and environmental governance).

Table 4 shows the assumed impact on knowledge not only of single publications but of journals, particularly those that published more than two papers of our datasets. They account for almost one-third of the entire set of investigated publications included in the three datasets. Energy policy is overall the most predominant journal in our dataset and is also listed among the most relevant international peer-reviewed journal in energy research. It investigates the policy implications of energy issues by economic, social, planning, and environmental perspective. According to the investigation, it comprises articles belonging to all three sub-datasets and therefore covers all the concepts studied in this work. Other predominant journals are Energy Research and Social Science, which focuses on the relationship between energy systems and society, and Sustainability (Switzerland), which has a broader scope, not focusing exclusively on energy.

In order to enable an inter-journal comparison, the study relies on the Impact Factor (IF), which is commonly used to measure the importance of a journal, in its field, meant as the assumed impact on knowledge that it has had during a fixed period of time and included as a reference each journal’s influence on the scientific discussion. The higher the IF is, the better the journal ranking, compared to others of its own discipline. In order to enable such a comparison, the study looked at the discipline categorization of journals provided by Web of Science. For the most common categories in our list, Environmental Sciences and Environmental Studies, the most prominent journal is Global Environmental Change (IF of 10.427), which includes a few of the listed articles. Excluding this broadly labeled journal, the most influencing journal in Environmental Sciences is the Journal of Cleaner Production (IF of 6.395), comprising four articles of our dataset. Energy Research and Social Science (IF of 5.525), comprising seven publications, seems to be the predominant journal in Environmental Studies.

The previous analysis of the scientific literature’s discussion of the topics of governance and social innovation in the energy transition is thought of foremost importance to understand its state of the art and its evolution. Focusing on the content of the papers is necessary to understand the potential empirical implications of the changing and developing discussion on energy governance. Table 5 lists the eight publications that have been identified by the literature datasets to be the basis of the initial investigation, based on specific keywords as described in Sect. 2.2. They were selected because of the empirical information they provide, in particular the case studies they describe and the examples of social innovation initiatives they present. They not only describe European initiatives, but also experiences from Latin America and Japan, reflecting the results of the geographical distribution of the scientific discussion in energy research. Most of the energy/governance/social innovation initiatives refer to energy communities that produce electricity from renewable energy sources (RES), although they vary in size, territorial level and kind of stakeholders involved. They also mostly focus on describing contextual barriers and opportunities that drive the development of such initiatives. Two publications go beyond the concept of energy community and refer to more integrated experiences, such as living labs and smart city projects. However, it remains surprising the limited extent to which the living lab concept seems to have entered the scientific discussion in relation to energy governance and social innovation. This might be linked to one of the main challenges regarding the implementation of the concept: a stable and effective participation of various stakeholders throughout energy governance and ICT processes and the creation of a community beyond the framework of timely limited smart city projects (Nesti 2018). The application of the concept is currently further explored by the authors in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 project STARDUST (Tomasi et al. 2019).

Finally, an analysis of the keywords frequency has been performed. Keywords analysis can highlight the research focus and direction of an article (Wu et al. 2020) and therefore sheds further light on its content. The keywords frequency analysis has been performed with the software NVivo, treating similar words, i.e., stemmed words (e.g., policy, policies), as one keyword. Datasets 2 and 3 appear to be more heterogeneous than dataset 1, since in both cases around 60% of the keywords only appear once. Interesting, in all three sub-datasets, the keyword city/urban appears within the 20 most recurring, and in datasets 2 and 3 within the first four, meaning that the research about social innovation in energy research occurs for the moment mainly at the urban level. Moreover, the keyword planning is also one of the most frequently occurring ones in all three datasets, suggesting that (urban, spatial) planning is closely interlinked with energy governance and social innovation.

This study combines bibliometrics with content analysis to mainly quantitatively but also qualitatively analyze the interplay of the concepts of governance and social innovation in the context of energy transition, by exploring the relevant discussion in the existing scientific literature to the present and the extent and impact of such discussion. The size of the three obtained literature datasets was constrained by the choice of resorting to the two main scientific search engines. Thus, future research should consider including Google Scholar as a publication source: A recent article highlighted that, on the one hand, Scopus and Web of Science are quite reliable, but only partially cover the relevant literature. On the other hand, Google Scholar is more comprehensive but its automatized approach to select documents may lead to duplicates, errors and a high amount of gray literature (Martin et al. 2018). Moreover, the criteria used for publication source could bias the datasets obtained. Relaxing the search parameters could lead to a more comprehensive review of the status quo of knowledge about social innovation and governance in the energy transition. In addition, the selection of the search keywords could be further refined (e.g., by including selected social innovation or energy governance types) to gain more specific insights into the concepts and reduce inaccuracies linked to the screening of mainly abstracts and keywords.

All things considered, this study makes a first attempt to investigate the role of new approaches of energy governance in the current energy transition, as perceived by the scientific community and reflected in the current scientific knowledge about the topic. With the rapid changes that the current energy transition requires, the scientific discussion in energy research literature is increasingly focusing on the governance aspects of new energy systems, and innovative social innovation initiatives are receiving growing attention. As the analysis of the various dimensions of the three literature datasets has shown, social innovation individually is yet less often discussed. However, the research about new energy governance has been increasing over the last two decades, and it now covers each continent, with Europe being the frontrunner. And, as the content analysis revealed, practitioners increasingly take into consideration energy governance in local and regional energy planning. At the same time, it needs to be highlighted that most of the papers discussing concrete examples or case studies focus on identifying barriers and opportunities that might further drive the development of new forms of energy governance or social innovation. They highlight that still a major gap exists between existing policy targets, e.g., in further fostering energy communities, and the actual implementation (e.g., big utilities as major national and regional players). In addition, the scientific literature discussion on governance seems strongest where wider environmental aspects or the development of integrated solutions is studied, likely hinting that governance and social innovation play a particular important role with regard to the solving of complex problems. However, this needs to be subject to further scrutiny in upcoming research.