Energy transition on the rise: discourses on energy future in the German parliament

Abstract

In this paper we describe energy policy discourses and their story-lines in German parliamentary debates, and trace their evolution over the past decades. Through content analysis and coding with MAXQDA, changes in the discourses and in the use of story-lines by different political parties are analyzed. Our study shows that while the concept of a transition towards a nuclear-free, renewables-based energy system became hegemonic within three decades, the discourse itself underwent major changes. Energy Transition was de-radicalized and became part of a discourse of Ecological Modernization, thus aligning with mainstream economic logic. There are still considerable differences in the story-lines narrated by parliamentarians about pathways to Energy Transition and its effects. Discursive struggles into the meaning and the means of the transition project continue, suggesting that discourse structuration is far from complete.

Keywords:

• discourse analysis
• story-lines
• energy transition
• renewable energy
• energy policy
• Germany

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ottmar Edenhofer, Karoline Steinbacher and Fabian Joas for their helpful comments on the research design. We are also grateful to the participants of the PhD seminar at MCC and of the 27th PhD Workshop on International Climate Policy 2015 in Berlin, Germany, for their feedback. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the 2nd International Conference on Public Policy 2015 in Milan, Italy, and at the 10th International Conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis 2015 in Lille, France. We are grateful for the feedback from participants, and in particular thank Tanya Heikkila, Elizabeth Shanahan, Imrat Verhoeven, Jennifer Dodge and Tamara Metze for their valuable comments and suggestions. The manuscript also benefited greatly from the comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All citations from parliamentary debates in this paper were translated into English by the authors.

2. Although the ACF and Hajer’s discourse coalition approach are based on different epistemological assumptions, there is a certain amount of comparability (Winkel et al. 2011).

3. Speeches were retrieved from the federal government’s bulletin, http://www.bundesregierung.de/Webs/Breg/DE/Service/Bulletin/_node.html. The electronic version covers documents starting from 1987. Speeches dating before 1987 were retrieved from the archive of the Federal Press Office.

4. http://www.bmwi.de/DE/Themen/Energie/Energiewende/monitoring-prozess.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Reiner Lemoine Stiftung through a PhD fellowship to Anna Leipprand, administered by Technische Universität Berlin under [Project Number 10041954].