Regional Strategies for Renewable Energies: Development Processes in Greater Manchester

Abstract

Making the transition to renewable, low-carbon forms of energy could be the defining question of our times. Especially for complex problems such as energy supply the regional scale and new forms of control, coordination and cooperation—subsumed under the term regional governance—are widely discussed both in politics (e.g. G8 conferences, Climate Summits, etc.) and academia. The turn from conventional to renewable energies is one major topic of discussion. For this process of change, regional governance can be seen as the best way to initiate it. With the help of a case study conducted in Greater Manchester, UK, this article concentrates on two points: (1) the development of regional governance arrangements in the light of a low-carbon agenda as mixture of path-dependent bottom-up and top-down approaches and (2) the impacts of specific constellations and environments for regional energy development that include institutional rules, strategic behaviour of actors and strategic discourses. This article shows that the integration of a regional governance structure into the strategic development process can achieve a substantial qualitative improvement for the development of a regional energy strategy.

Acknowledgements

This article emerged out of a Diploma thesis at the University of Bayreuth. I have to thank my supervisors Anke Matuschewski and Manfred Miosga (both University of Bayreuth/Germany) for their support and Martin Hess (University of Manchester/UK) for his shared experiences in Manchester. Furthermore, I thank Rob Krueger (Worcester Polytechnic Institute/USA) and the unknown reviewers for helpful comments. The field study was financially supported by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).