Taking first steps so that others can run – functions and limitations of governing the local energy transition

ABSTRACT

Rising energy prices and fuel scarcity are exposing the volatility of our energy system and creating additional pressures to speed up the transition towards renewable energy using distributed production and integrated local grids. This raises the need for local governments to become more actively involved in energy governance by managing the transition of their energy systems and involving local stakeholders. However, the exact role of local authorities in steering this transition remains uncertain as they lack financial and administrative capacities and rely extensively on experimental innovation projects and external stakeholders. This paper therefore asks what functions local authorities exercise to govern the energy transition and under what conditions they can facilitate participation in and scaling of energy innovations. Drawing on the literature on experimental governance, the paper analyses four qualitative case studies of energy innovation projects run by local governments in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. It finds that local authorities can actively support innovation projects through funding and knowledge, convene between stakeholder groups, scale innovations through planning and promotional work, and use trial insights to advocate for policy change. However, their ability to exercise these functions is dependent on local stakeholder constellations and domestic policy conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Renewable energy
• energy transition
• energy communities
• local governance
• experimental governance
• green cities

Introduction

Skyrocketing energy prices and fuel scarcity are adding to the pressure caused by climate change to speed up the transition towards renewable energy systems. Against this backdrop, the European Union (EU) and many Member States are doubling down on efforts to make the energy system more resilient and innovative by relying on distributed energy production and integrated local grids. This raises the need for local governments to more actively manage the transition of local energy systems. Cities are therefore taking on the task of developing climate transition strategies, setting up goalposts, and creating plans of action that involve networks of local stakeholders (Haf & Robison, 2020). In doing so, they are expected to drive energy system innovation and generate public acceptance of distributed energy provision by means of experimental governance and stakeholder networks (Eneqvist, 2024). Distributed energy provision is expected to provide energy flexibility through digital demand-response and storage, thereby increasing grid resilience, as well as offering energy security, cost savings, and jobs to local communities. The experimental and participatory nature of this shift is inscribed, for instance, in the EU’s ‘Clean Energy for All Europeans Package’ (European Commission, 2020) which promotes energy communities. In energy communities, multiple stakeholders (including households, businesses, and municipalities) engage in collaborative renewable energy production and distribution, often at the local scale. Besides building renewable energy infrastructures together, they often rely on innovative prosumer activities, such as energy storage, P2P exchange,¹ or electric vehicle (EV) charging to enhance their collective energy security, reduce consumption, and ensure price stability, thereby generating shared financial benefits (Acosta et al., 2018; Tricarico, 2018).

This governmental emphasis on local energy transitions is at odds with local governments’ often severely limited financial and organisational capacities and lack of political mandates. Fiscal austerity and the privatisation of public infrastructure leave most local governments with little direct influence on their energy systems and a dependence on the private sector for implementing innovations (Thompson et al., 2020). However, the literature on experimental governance shows that local governments can play an important role by fostering innovations. By trialling new solutions, they can identify good practices, thereby encouraging cognitive and behavioural change among stakeholders, and generating learnings to inform policy changes (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013). Yet, critical accounts of experimental governance warn against the ‘projectification’ of politics, in which cities support random innovations without developing cohesive transition strategies or involving citizens in participatory learning (Eneqvist, 2024). More insight is required into how local governments can address this tension between the benefits and challenges of experimental governance, to understand whether it offers an effective solution for steering the transition towards a decentralised renewable energy system.

This paper therefore examines whether an experimental approach can enable local governments² to contribute to the energy transition and how they can manoeuvre challenges of projectification and a lack of public ownership. Drawing on experimental governance literature, it analyses evidence from four energy community pilot projects run by local governments in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. The paper thereby contributes to the literature on energy transitions by identifying diverse stakeholder partnerships involved in trialling and scaling energy innovations, the particular role of local government in fostering innovations, and revealing key drivers and barriers informing the effectiveness of experimental governance in this field. Qualitative data is generated through semi-structured interviews with local administrators, politicians, and businesses involved in the pilots, participation in local events organised by the pilots, and document analysis of pilot meeting minutes, local policies and energy transition plans.

The following section discusses the changing role of local governments in the energy transition, introducing concepts from the experimental governance literature. This is followed by a section introducing the cases and methods. Afterwards, findings are presented and discussed, focusing on the four distinct local government roles of supporting, facilitating, scaling and advocating energy innovations. A concluding section summarises the findings and discusses the implications.

Local government and the energy transition

The challenge of governing the renewable energy transition is exacerbated by the fact that European governments have largely privatised their energy production and distribution infrastructures (Yurchenko, 2020). Instead of exercising direct control, governments therefore need to create incentives for private actors and consumers to adopt more sustainable energy practices, as well as rely on privately-owned distribution system operators (DSOs) to build and maintain infrastructure (Bauknecht et al., 2020). This transition also entails a spatial dimension: As the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy involves a geographical dispersal of production sites, energy governance in Europe is simultaneously undergoing vertical integration between the local, regional, national and EU levels, and relying more heavily on local governments to steer changes in their communities’ energy consumption (Bridge et al., 2013).

Experimental governance

This rescaling of governance is intertwined with a growing reliance on urban experiments, especially around environmental interventions. Governmental bodies, in particular at the local level, launch and support pilot projects to trial socio-technical innovations. This ‘experimental governance’ approach aims at developing new solutions by harnessing local innovation, monitoring their impact and fostering institutional learning (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013). Innovations can ultimately be scaled beyond their experimental context by replicating them across cities, regions or countries, using lessons to inform policy change, or encouraging cognitive and behavioural change among stakeholders (Moore et al., 2015).

In a context of diminished fiscal resources and public control over key infrastructure, experimentalism also offers local governments an effective way to steer socio-environmental transitions, (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013) through multi-helix partnerships with the private sector, academia, and citizen organisations, to mobilise resources, diffuse innovations, and ensure democratic accountability (Eneqvist et al., 2022). In most cities, private companies are the main type of stakeholder relied upon to adopt and scale energy innovations, lending the local government an ‘entrepreneurial’ role (Thompson et al., 2020). Companies are thus not only subsidised for adopting renewable technologies but often involved in implementing local transition plans and building new energy infrastructures (Haf & Robison, 2020). By contrast, ‘radical municipalist’ governments explore alternatives to this by relying on participatory democratic forums and public-community partnerships to foster a more democratic energy transition (Thompson et al., 2020).

To scale innovations beyond their experimental context, local governments need to engage in multilevel policymaking (Naber et al., 2017), sharing lessons and promoting the best practices at higher institutional levels. This requires national government bodies to monitor and draw on the knowledge generated at the local level. In turn, cities can design innovations with scaling in mind, involving relevant stakeholders, and practising reflexive learning to upgrade their own governance modes (Morgan, 2018). Participating in this collective learning process can strengthen their long-term commitment to innovative solutions (Bernardo & D’Alessandro, 2019)

Challenges of experimental governance

While scholarship on experimental governance has been invaluable for understanding recent shifts in policymaking and the role of local government, it also highlights several challenges. To study how local governments can use experimentalism to steer the energy transition, we need to identify how they address these challenges.

First, a focus on innovation and monitoring carries a risk of overestimating the power of experimentation to affect change. Some scholars have criticised experimental governance for encouraging the ‘projectification’ of policymaking in the form of disjointed, short-term policy actions, instead of a more cohesive and synchronised approach to organising urban stakeholders (Grönholm, 2022). A relatively sporadic uptake of experimental innovations between cities, they argue, raises questions about the feasibility of experiments to drive sustainable transformation. Thus, instead of only assessing experimental projects, we need to investigate how local governments aim to scale innovations and facilitate institutional learning (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013).

Second, when characterising multi-helix partnerships, we need to account for the diverse resources, interests, and influence of different stakeholders (Nielsen et al., 2013). The largest energy consumers are private companies, whose profit-orientation informs their decision whether to adopt renewable energy innovations or join energy communities. Most energy producers and DSOs are private companies as well. Some cities have retained public ownership over their energy infrastructures or ‘remunicipalised’ them, often involving intense political conflicts (Traill & Cumbers, 2023). Some authors also note that a lacklustre involvement of citizens in experimental projects undermines the democratic legitimacy of experimental governance (Eneqvist et al., 2022). Thus, we need to examine how local governments manage the divergent interests of public, private, and citizen stakeholders, both within experiments themselves and in processes of learning and scaling.

Third, we need to account for the diverse and uneven development between cities. Urban scholars sometimes fall into the ‘local trap’ of assuming local governments to be inherently more sustainable, democratic, and capable of solving all their own problems (Purcell, 2006). Yet, local governments possess highly uneven resources and knowledge and are embedded within distinct multiscalar policy regimes that inform their engagement in energy innovation. For instance, local governments in Nordic countries tend to have greater fiscal resources to support and scale energy innovations, whereas in the UK and much of Southern Europe they must adhere to strict austerity conditions and often lack subsidies (Traill & Cumbers, 2023). This limits the potential for scaling. We therefore need to examine how and to what extent local governments can address these inequalities. This can involve translocal exchange via networks, such as the Covenant of Mayors, which enable local governments to engage in mutual learning and capacity building, yet are often internally unequal themselves (Nielsen & Papin, 2021). It can also involve advocacy among higher-level institutional bodies (including the EU) to create supportive policy frameworks to level the playing field and foster cohesion between cities (Yurchenko, 2020).

Analytical framework: capturing how local governments engage in experimental governance

Given these challenges, an analytical framework capable of characterising how local governments can engage in experimental governance to steer the energy transition needs to account for their own experimental projects, the stakeholder networks they engage with, and the ways in which they aim to implement innovations. To develop such a framework, we take inspiration from Eneqvist and Karvonen (2021), who distinguish between five strategic functions of local governments: Governments can (a) promote a vision for a desirable future to guide the direction of experiments, (b) facilitate engagement between urban stakeholders in experiments, (c) support experiments through services, resources, infrastructure, and permits, (d) amplify experimental results by applying them to new policies and promoting findings to higher levels, and (e) guard public welfare and values, such as democracy and the rule of law, to ensure experiments address the most relevant societal issues.

By focusing on distinct activities, this conceptualisation enables a nuanced examination of how local governments drive the energy transition. However, while guarding public welfare is a crucial function of local governments, we do not understand it as an independent activity that is performed separately from others, but rather as a normative ambition that can be achieved through value-based policymaking and stakeholder engagement (as argued by Morgan, 2018). Conversely, both visioning and amplification involve promoting and assisting in the implementation of innovations beyond the experimental project. Yet, given the different challenges and stakeholders involved in implementing innovations through ‘horizontal’ replication and ‘vertical’ institutionalisation (Grönholm, 2022; Moore et al., 2015), we consider it more critical to distinguish between activities to promote the replication of innovations (scaling) and to affect policy change at higher institutional levels (advocacy).

Thus, our own analysis revolves around how local governments (a) facilitate stakeholder involvement in energy innovation projects, (b) support those innovation projects, (c) scale innovations beyond the scope of experiments, and (d) advocate for policy change beyond the local level. For every activity, we also interrogate what other actors are involved in these practices and what enabling or restricting conditions inform the success of the projects.

Methodology

We use an intense-case-study design (Patton, 2014) to analyse and compare the governance of experimental energy pilot projects by four local governments in Northern Europe – Amersfoort (NL), West-Suffolk (UK), Malmö (SE) and Mechelen (BE).

The four local governments joined together in the European Interreg project ‘ACCESS’ which aimed to promote the implementation of pilot projects experimenting with local energy transitions. The ACCESS project offered funding and capacity building through knowledge exchange between local project coordinators in the pilots and knowledge partners (ACCESS, 2023).

The four local governments represent ‘intense cases’, as they have ambitious climate and energy strategies, specialise in running experimental projects to address the sustainability challenge, and therefore enjoy a reputation among higher-level institutions as being sustainability ‘pioneers’, who could be relied on for developing innovations (ACCESS, 2023). This makes them exceptionally relevant and information-rich regarding their engagement in experimental governance and the energy innovation.

At the same time, the cases differ regarding project substance, governance setup, and political-economic context. One pilot involved PV installation, batteries and energy storage in residential settings (Amersfoort); one involved energy production and monitoring in a business park (West Suffolk Council) and two pilots involved mobility hubs in the form of parking facilities with installation of PV, battery and EV charging stations (Malmö and Mechelen). The governance set-ups also varied. The pilots in Mechelen and Amersfoort were run by public-private partnerships, in Malmö by the local government in collaboration with a municipally owned parking company, and in West Suffolk by the local government, which relied on a private company to facilitate energy exchange. Moreover, while the cases are all in Northern Europe (within and outside the EU), their political and economic contexts differ. Malmö applies a ‘mission-based’ approach to local governance by which policy missions drive departmental activities, while Mechelen has a climate team dedicated to integrating sustainability objectives across local government activities. Amersfoort’s environmental transition strategy emphasises multi-stakeholder participation, while West Suffolk collaborates extensively with other local councils in its county. Additionally, the cases represent different levels of competencies at the local level due to given multi-level governance structures.

Comparing four cases therefore allows us to identify and distinguish common and place-specific implementation factors for energy transition projects at the local level. These findings do not extend beyond Northern European cases, and our final section discusses if and how the findings can be applied beyond pioneers.

To investigate the role of local governments in running and scaling the four projects, we combine qualitative document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation of four workshops conducted within the ACCESS project, thus triangulating data to enhance the validity of our findings (Flick, 2018).

Our document analysis covers policy documents on local and national climate and energy strategies, policy action plans and evaluation reports by the four cities, and reports authored by the pilot project teams. Using a coding matrix based on our analytical framework as well as open coding, we analysed documents to map the four cities’ energy transition goals and actions, the pilots’ progress, functions of local government and stakeholder involvement in the pilots and multi-level governance structures.

We conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with local politicians and administrators working on energy, sustainability, and city development, as well as business representatives involved in renewable energy innovation such as P2P exchange (Table 1). Interviewees were key stakeholders within or outside government selected to represent different perspectives on the role of local government, the experiences within the pilots, and the wider energy transition.

Table 1. List of interviews.

#	Respondent function
R1–R3	Council representative, WSC & UK
R4–R6	Business representative, UK
R7	DSO, UK
R8 and R9	City administrator, Mechelen
R10	Local politician, Mechelen
R11	Business representative, BE
R12 and R13	City administrator, Malmö
R14	Public company representative, Malmö
R15	City administrator, Amersfoort
R16 and R17	Business representative, NL

Interviews took place between October 2022 and April 2023 and lasted approximately an hour on average. Questions revolved around the respondents’ perception of governance mechanisms, stakeholder participation, enablers, barriers, and lessons experienced in the pilots, and their views on the role of local government and other key actors in the energy transition. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, followed by qualitative thematic coding based on the analytical framework as well as open coding. Thematic codes involved roles of different stakeholders in the pilots, local government functions in the pilot, as well as barriers and enablers in the implementation of the pilots and their implications for scaling of the pilots.

Furthermore, we conducted participant observation of four workshops, one in each city (online or on-site). The workshops were organised to facilitate engagement between local project holders (authorities) and different local stakeholders to ensure the successful implementation of the pilots. We helped facilitate the workshops with project holders, identifying general themes related to pilot implementation and how to tailor these themes to specific contexts. The general themes revolved around stakeholder needs and interests. These themes and participants were targeted to specific needs of each pilot. Some workshops therefore focused on cross-departmental collaboration within city government, while others focused on collaboration with key energy suppliers or users. The number of participants in the workshops varied from about 5–20. As data for our research, we took written field notes, focusing on the main arguments and positions of participants regarding their opportunities and needs. These notes were analysed to capture the roles of different stakeholders as well as barriers and opportunities for the pilots and their scaling, in line with the analytical framework.

The combination of individual interviews with workshop observations and extensive document analysis provides rich data material for this paper, and data triangulation allowed us to develop a deeper understanding of the roles of local governments in the energy transition.

Findings

Across the four experimental projects, public and private sector stakeholders emphasize the importance of local governments in leading the local transition to renewable energy. They point to the democratic legitimacy of local officials and administrators, the strategic value of their planning authority, their experience of trialling pilots, and their reliability as project partners as key resources for governing and scaling energy innovations. Local governments are thus seen as crucial for setting the agenda for local development, and for mobilising other stakeholders and facilitating communication and collaboration between them (R4, R5, R11, R16).

Local government representatives also view their role as multi-faceted, as it involves direct leadership through sustainable city planning and policymaking, and indirect promotion of renewable energy through public communication and incentives (R1, R2, R9). Indeed, the four cities have developed ambitious climate sustainability plans exceeding their countries’ national strategies, with three of them aiming to become carbon neutral by 2030 (Amersfoort Municipality, 2020; Stad, 2020; West Suffolk Council, 2020). However, they cite their limited financial resources, organizational capacity and technical expertise as barriers to steering the expansion of renewable energy practices by themselves. Their activities therefore primarily aim at involving other actors, especially the private sector, in trialling innovations, and incentivising them to adopt those innovations (R9).

Notwithstanding differences in national legislation and public infrastructure, the four local governments engage in similar forms of experimental governance to lead the renewable energy transition by supporting, facilitating, scaling, and advocating innovations. In doing so, they encounter numerous internal and external enablers and barriers and rely on diverse collaboration partners. While most of these are common across cases, we also identified distinct partnerships, enablers and barriers for each city (Table 2).

Table 2. Local government functions, enablers and barriers.

Local government functions	Key partnerships	Internal enablers	External enablers	Barriers
Supporting energy innovation projects	All: Knowledge partners, consultants	All: Trial experience, local energy strategy	All: Innovation funding	AME, MEC: Legal barriers MAL: bureaucracy
Facilitating stakeholder engagement	All: Pre-existing networks MAL, MEC: Agents of change	All: Skilled city administrators	WSC, MAL: Business case, strong stakeholder motivation	All: No DSO involvement MEC: Risk-averse companies AME: no household involvement
Scaling energy innovations	All: Business networks MAL: Public companies	All: Planning policy MAL: Public infrastructure	All: Rising energy costs	All: No financial incentives for P2P or storage AME, MAL: little civic participation
Advocating for policy change	All: Ties to higher level officials	MEC: Local politicians championing innovations	All: Political window of opportunity MEC: multilevel government alignment	All: Vague EU policy AME: Unsupportive local politicians

The following sections present each of the different governance functions in detail.

Supporting energy innovation projects

A key role of local governments in the energy transition lies in trialling energy innovations and sharing lessons on enablers, barriers and good practices to inspire other stakeholders to follow suit. As one Mechelen city administrator explains, running small pilot projects is a key foundation for identifying good practices before attempting to replicate them at scale:

It's a small project but it makes it easy to cover and monitor and see what's happening. And then afterwards you can scale up and make it more complex and broader. (R9)

Energy innovation projects can also develop important insights that can feed into changes to policies or city planning by presenting politicians with data, success stories, and highlighting the potential of new approaches (R10). Thus, local governments provide different forms of support to help create and develop experimental energy communities and share their lessons across sectors and scales.

An essential form of support is fundraising. To help innovation projects off the ground, administrators from all four local governments regularly assist other stakeholders in drafting applications for innovation funding (R2, R9, R10, R13). Local administrators were also involved in designing the four pilot projects themselves. Lack of funding can constitute a major barrier for other projects.

Another crucial resource is the backing of political decision-makers. Across all four cases, local politicians were instrumental in approving project funding and confronting project obstacles, such as delays, technical issues, or financial difficulties. In Mechelen, for instance, the alderman for mobility aided the pilot by allowing it to ‘skip the queue’ among city development projects (R9). Conversely, where local politicians were more risk-averse, either due to political unwillingness or a lack of experience with energy innovation, they could constrain the projects’ innovative potential. This was the case in Amersfoort, where local decision-makers were initially sceptical about involving private project partners, delaying the project’s progress for a time (R15).

A third source of support is knowledge. As local governments engage in innovations, they accumulate important technical and administrative experience. The city of Mechelen’s experience in trialling innovations, for instance, helped consolidate knowledge resources at the city level, which informed its engagement with other innovation projects (R10). Such knowledge was not only developed ‘in-house’, but also through local knowledge providers. West-Suffolk worked with a ‘Knowledge Transfer Project’, involving the local university and think tanks, which provided advice on how to communicate the benefits of innovative technologies to different stakeholders (R2). By contrast, since Amersfoort initially lacked expertise around renewable energy, its pilot needed the support of consultants, some of whom did not have all the necessary skills either (R15).

Retaining localised knowledge presented a challenge across cases, as several project administrators switched jobs and took their unique insights with them (R13). This points towards a need for building a more solid foundation of energy-related knowledge at the city level, either through training administrators themselves or securing competent consultants early on. In Malmö, cross-departmental collaboration through the city’s mission-based approach offers another option, as lessons from pilot projects were institutionalised across departments, thus avoiding the concentration of knowledge in single resorts (or individuals) and ensuring that insights could directly feed into new and larger projects (R13).

Facilitating stakeholder engagement in the energy transition

Respondents from all four cities agreed that local governments could neither dictate the energy transition process, nor organize and finance all necessary innovations and scaling activities. However, they could provide political and strategic guidance while relying on other stakeholders to implement renewable energy practices. This division of labour applied both to running experimental trial projects and scaling energy innovations, although the former involved more direct participation by local administrators. As such, local governments were quite proactive, often exercising the role of central convenors for other stakeholders, rather than merely facilitating their activities. As one administrator summarised:

This is mostly what we do. We coordinate, we start up, we subsidise, or we try using rules to make things happen, but we're not really doing it ourselves mostly. (R15)

City administrators highlighted the need for effective coalitions to be broad and inclusive, involving actors from the mobility sector, local industry, energy production, real estate, as well as political figures who could lend a strong public voice (R9, R13). Moreover, energy service providers and engineering companies were key to helping build the renewable energy infrastructure and facilitate P2P exchange. The projects in Mechelen and Amersfoort also collaborated with real estate companies, while WSC and Mechelen involved local businesses.

Most of these collaborations were public-private partnerships, but the city of Malmö stood out by collaborating with municipally-owned parking company Parkering Malmö and real estate company MKB. The former was deeply involved in co-running the pilot and adding innovations such as energy sharing and wooden building materials (R14).

By contrast, participation by households played a marginal role, including in Amersfoort, where only residents in single-family homes were consulted, while those living in apartment blocks were represented by a housing company (R15). Indeed, citizen-driven energy projects were considered a marginal factor for the energy transition as a whole due to the need for speed and scale of the energy transition (R13), calling into question how and to what extent their democratising potential could actually be realised.

Another contentious point was the absence of DSOs from the pilots, with some eventually getting involved towards the very end of the trial period. As large-scale grid operators, DSOs are focused on building and maintaining energy infrastructure, and thus not usually involved in supporting or trialling small energy coproduction projects (Smink et al., 2015; R7). Most respondents considered this absence a barrier to energy innovation, given the major control DSOs exercise over their countries’ energy provision (R8, R13, R15). However, some businesses were satisfied with the DSOs’ current focus due to the urgent need for large-scale infrastructure:

I'm happy that they're just investing a lot in a good infrastructure because I think that's important. […] The DSO should be involved, but the real potential has to be proven and I think afterwards there is a mechanism of flexibility and pricing of flexibility. (R17).

Beyond individual projects, many cities established local business networks to facilitate collaborative action. Malmö launched the LFM30 network, in which 215 local companies pledged to implement climate-neutral construction projects and halve their climate impact by 2025 (LFM30, 2023). Similarly, the GOPACS network in the Netherlands enables numerous companies to collectively coordinate their energy production and grid-feeding activities, thus allowing even smaller actors to contribute to balancing the grid and, by extension, making decentralised energy provision more appealing for DSO involvement (R16).

Collaboration with stakeholders also carried several challenges, however, many of which were evident within the pilots themselves. In several cases, national or European legal constraints hampered the ability of local governments to exercise key collaborative functions. In Amersfoort, European data protection law prevented the local government from handling residents’ private energy data, thus revealing a general barrier for cities aiming to manage P2P energy exchange themselves (R15). Similarly, as European public procurement law require the use of open tenders, Malmö’s government was forced to contract 13 different suppliers for separate technological components, which resulted in a technical mismatch between them (R14). Additionally, the UK and Sweden prohibited building solar panels on many historical buildings (R3, R12). Moreover, energy taxation and a lack of targeted subsidies failed to incentivise the adoption of innovative practices across countries. For instance, P2P exchange was effectively penalised in the Netherlands and Belgium via grid charges, while subsidies for energy efficiency in buildings were phased out in Sweden. Not only did this inhibit stakeholder involvement in innovation projects, but it also discouraged actors from eventually adopting innovations (R8, R12, R17).

Independent of policy restraints, reconciling different stakeholder interests in some cases proved challenging, as building and retail companies tended to prioritise energy security, while other businesses focused primarily on price stability, making it difficult to satisfy everyone (R11). Companies also tended to be hesitant about joining P2P energy exchange, as they were unsure about the financial benefits and in some cases already tied to pre-existing energy contracts (R9). Scaling proved far from an automatic process, and cities therefore had to develop strategies for managing it.

Scaling

Local governments largely relied on other stakeholders to scale energy innovations, but they crucially contributed to this process in two ways: Directly through urban planning policy and indirectly through public promotion. In doing so, the four governments were quite successful at avoiding the problem of projectification by actively applying experimental practices across their cities.

Since local governments hold planning authority over new development projects, they could use pilot lessons to steer new construction towards implementing renewable energy solutions. In Mechelen, for instance, the pilot was part of a larger sustainable mobility hub aimed at shifting traffic out of the city centre. Some of its lessons were also implemented at a larger scale, as the construction company involved in the pilot began adding solar PV and vehicle charging stations to other parking buildings, and the city was planning to construct similar sustainable mobility infrastructure in a large new residential area across town (R9).

In West-Suffolk, the local council used its authority to leverage the installation of renewable energy and heating infrastructure in local buildings, and to link the theme of energy to other urban development themes such as employment and education to foster relevant knowledge and skills. Moreover, local councils across the county coordinated their transition plans and shared funding resources (R1). In Malmö, the local government could rely on municipally-owned parking and housing companies to direct the implementation of energy innovations in new construction projects (R13). Parkering Malmö, for instance, planned to implement some of the pilot’s innovations in all its future projects and thus expected to play a central role in scaling renewable energy alternatives (R14). Moreover, the local government planned to re-focus its experimental approach from top-down driven single projects to more co-creative pilot area experimentation across different neighbourhoods, to gain knowledge about the influence of socio-economic inequalities between households on the use of energy infrastructures and their climate impact (R13). This approach thereby contributes to tackling both projectification and social inequalities within the city.

Local governments also promoted pilot lessons and energy practices publicly, by celebrating their successes and sharing knowledge about their encountered challenges (R1). WSC, for instance, promoted its P2P energy exchange scheme, informing the public about the energy costs saved due to the scheme, and managing to convince several local companies to join (R4, R5, R6). Other cities, such as Mechelen, enlisted the support of local politicians to promote innovation practices in public. The city’s alderman for mobility regularly gave talks at universities and business schools to promote electric vehicle innovations (R10). Private sector stakeholders highly appreciated this clarity of vision within the city government, as it enhanced their own planning ability:

Their vision was clear from the beginning, and if you know this is the framework and this is what the city needs or wants, then you can anticipate it. (R11)

Some local governments also focused on promoting innovative practices among other cities to help them develop long-term commitments and drive large-scale change collectively. Having signed the Covenant of Mayors, Mechelen was engaged in transnational knowledge exchange to share experiences with other cities. Besides mutual learning, this exchange was also motivated by a friendly sense of competition over successful sustainability strategies (R9).

However, some interviewees were concerned that other cities may be ill-equipped to replicate their innovations. As pioneer cities, they possessed specialised knowledge and capacities, giving them uniquely beneficial conditions for innovation that could amplify political and economic inequalities between cities and thus make their innovations difficult to adopt elsewhere (R3). This echoes Nielsen and Papin’s (2021) observation that the ability to run experimental pilot projects offers cities a competitive advantage, even within mutual exchange. Moreover, it indicates that while local governments may overcome the challenge of projectification within their own cities, it can remain a problem of experimental governance at scale, if innovations are mostly restricted to pioneer cities without concrete strategies for larger-scale implementation.

Thus, sharing successes alone was not considered sufficient for ensuring the adoption of energy innovations at scale. Several respondents underlined the need for developing multimedia ‘inspiration documents’ with detailed explanations of the innovations’ inherent enablers, barriers and needs. This was considered an important (and often missing) second step between developing and scaling innovative practices that could provide other stakeholders with the necessary tools to emulate those practices more skill- and carefully. Through their shared international project context, the four local governments helped develop such an inspirational document in the form of an interactive online booklet (ACCESS, 2023).

Advocacy

Finally, all respondents emphasised the need for multilevel policy change to drive the renewable energy transition, especially among non ‘pioneer’ cities. National policy contexts were deemed particularly influential in determining the conditions of local energy governance. The four countries’ national governments introduced comprehensive energy transition plans, for instance requiring Dutch cities to shift half of their energy consumption to renewables by 2030 (Over Morgen, 2019). They also introduced funding instruments for sustainable innovation projects, which local governments and other stakeholders drew on to launch energy experiments (R3). In Belgium, the regional government in Flanders played an important role too, exerting leverage on local governments to phase out gas and making various public funding instruments for development projects contingent upon their contribution to emission reduction (R9). It also legalised the installation of PV infrastructure on protected buildings (Querelle, 2022).

Despite this supportive context, legislation on energy innovations was considered insufficient. City officials bemoaned political fluctuations due to electoral cycles, which inhibited consistent long-term support for transition projects. Administrators in Mechelen thus considered many of their local climate actions to be ‘paper tigers’ that lacked tangible follow-through. Despite the city’s ambitious energy transition goals, they therefore voiced concerns that support for green innovation was often superficial and hesitant to decentralise energy provision (R8).

Thus, engaging in multilevel policy advocacy was seen as another key responsibility for local governments to drive the renewable energy transition. Respondents in Mechelen considered it one of the main goals of their pilot project to generate insights that could help advocate for policy change across Flanders. As one administrator noted, implementing new legislation should be given key priority over enhancing the administration’s own organisational capacity:

With one [piece of] legislation we can change much more than 60 people working very hard in the field can ever do. (R8)

Specifically, respondents agreed that national legislation needed to provide more financial incentives for P2P energy exchange, energy storage, feeding back into the grid, and smart EV charging to convince other stakeholders, including DSOs, to adopt and support these practices. This could include tax reductions for energy consumption and subsidies for activities to balance the grid. National governments were also called on to raise awareness of the benefits of innovative practices, such as P2P schemes, as well as invest in upgrading their national digital systems for energy data reporting and communication (R17). Moreover, to raise the effectiveness of decentralised energy governance and level the playing field between cities, local administrations would need to receive additional financial resources and a stronger policy mandate to implement their ambitious climate and energy strategies through tangible actions (R8).

Many respondents perceived an overall policy trend in favour of fostering a renewable energy transition. Additionally, growing energy costs and problems with grid instability were pushing the need for renewable and distributed energy provision to the top of policy agendas (R2, R5, R9, R13). There was thus a widespread perception that a window of opportunity was opening to push for further and more holistic energy and sustainability commitments across multiple levels:

More and more you see that you need to have alignment between all the levels on much further ground than we had five years ago. Because you need to step in, you need to cross barriers, you need to have agreements, you need to have a change of business (R11)

The local politician involved in the Mechelen pilot reported having relatively strong ties to the regional government (R10), no doubt improving the local government’s chances of advocating for change.

Discussion

Our findings demonstrate that all four cities engaged in supporting, facilitating, scaling, and advocating for energy innovations. As such, they used experimental governance proactively to steer their local energy transition, often acting as central conveners rather than ‘mere’ facilitators. However, their ability to do so varied substantially based on domestic policy conditions and stakeholder networks. Three cities primarily relied on public-private partnerships, despite (non-energy) companies being highly risk-averse and hesitant to adopt energy innovations. By contrast, municipally-owned companies in Malmö were much more inclined towards trialling and scaling innovations. Across all cases, DSOs were not involved in developing energy innovations, but their dominant role in maintaining the grid made them indispensable for transforming the energy system at scale. Citizen participation was not considered an important factor either, despite respondents claiming its value for making the energy transition more socially and democratically inclusive.

This unevenness of stakeholder participation is rooted in the disparate interests and levels of influence between actors and reveals multiple intersecting tensions:

First, since most cities depend on private companies for scaling energy innovations, they are required to demonstrate and ensure the profitability of those innovations, which can be difficult to accomplish and may undermine the social and democratic qualities of practices such as P2P exchange. Public ownership over key infrastructure can mitigate this challenge by directing the scaling of energy innovations towards the ‘public good’, but only a few cities own enough infrastructure to pursue this strategy while most others operate under conditions of marketisation and fiscal austerity (Yurchenko, 2020). Combinations of both strategies would have the difficult task of reconciling different incentive structures for private and public companies, which are likely to favour different types of energy innovations. While this tension may not prevent the scaling of innovations, it demonstrates how strongly conditions of economic ownership affect the local energy transition, including the agency of local governments, the speed of the transition process, and the protection of public values such as transparency, social cohesion and accountability.

Second, DSOs operate on a larger geographic scale than local governments and their allies, making their involvement in energy innovation difficult. While most of our respondents considered this a shortcoming, some thought of it as an effective division of labour between small-scale innovators and large-scale service providers. The latter perspective echoes arguments in the literature, according to which the absence of major system-relevant stakeholders from trial projects can benefit experimental governance by allowing innovators to develop more alternative practices before having to tailor them to dominant interests (Bos & Brown, 2012). For this division to be effective, however, both scales need to align and complement one another. The British DSO, UK Power Networks, for instance, developed a nationwide database tracking household and company energy consumption and efficiency (R7), which policy-makers and administrators at all levels could use for designing and assessing the effectiveness of their interventions. Yet, in some areas of Sweden, the role of DSOs is exercised by municipally-owned energy providers, whose participation in energy innovation is thus more easily facilitated (R13), again highlighting the tension between public and private ownership.

Third, the lack of citizen involvement noted in our findings indicates that community participation is not prioritised in the cities’ experimental governance and energy transition strategies. Such a lack of input legitimacy has been identified as a possible weakness of experimental governance (Eneqvist, 2024), but it also reveals a risk of local governments employing a company-centric vision of energy communities and distributed energy provision. If only stakeholders of a certain scale are meaningfully involved in trialling and implementing energy innovations, those innovations risk losing their social and participatory potential, thus further marginalising the role of citizens. This underlines that even a transition towards distributed energy, rooted in energy communities, does not automatically ensure broader community participation.

These insights are in line with some of the more critical positions on experimental governance (Eneqvist & Karvonen, 2021; Grönholm, 2022; Thompson et al., 2020). Critical scholars often point towards the movement of ‘radical municipalist’ governments as offering potential solutions to these challenges by fostering citizen-driven democratisation and re-municipalisation of the local economy, including the energy system (Roth et al., 2023). Yet, while such governments are highly inspirational, they tend to require the mobilisation of large social movements to take shape and are thus relatively rare. By contrast, our findings indicate that local governments can also exercise a degree of proactive leadership through experimental governance, as their guidance and collaboration around innovations are indispensable for local stakeholders to develop their own sustainable transition plans.

However, this can create path dependencies, as the ability to trial and implement innovative solutions greatly benefits from accumulated knowledge and stakeholder networks developed through ongoing experimentation. On one hand, this can allow local governments to avoid the problem of projectification by organically embedding experimental innovations in urban planning. On the other hand, it demonstrates that projectification can remain a problem at larger scales, if there is no strategy for replicating experimental innovations across different local contexts. The creation of ‘inspiration documents’ by the participating cities thus underlines the importance of governing the process between trialing and scaling experimental innovations, which in turn requires consolidating institutional learning.

Our findings ultimately also amplify calls for greater multi-scalar and translocal policy coordination (Traill & Cumbers, 2023). While individual cities can run trials in different neighbourhoods to account for differences within their own territory (as in Malmö), overcoming differences between cities lies beyond their capabilities. Tackling this problem requires policy intervention beyond the local level to provide cities with sufficient resources and policy mandates to effectively lead the energy transition. In fact, despite an ostensibly supportive national and European policy environment, legislative frameworks were still considered insufficient for enabling cities to steer the renewable energy transition effectively.

Conclusions

This article demonstrates that cities can engage in experimental governance by (a) supporting innovation projects, such as energy communities, through funding and knowledge, (b) convening between stakeholder groups to involve them in the energy transition, (c) scaling energy innovations through planning policy and public promotional work, and (d) using trial insights to advocate for policy change at higher institutional levels. However, the cities’ ability to exercise these functions is highly dependent on local stakeholder constellations and domestic policy conditions.

Since this article only covers cases from Northern Europe, many of our conclusions hold limited generalizability. Yet, the significance of inter-city differences as a barrier to replicating energy innovations can be expected to be amplified at a larger scale, further raising the importance of the EU-level policy intervention. While the EU’s ‘Clean Energy for all Europeans Package’ may have increased the visibility of energy communities, it appears to provide insufficient guidance to ensure their flourishing. Thus, while most changes to energy policy would have to be implemented at national level (particularly in the case of the UK), European legislation could help pave the way for Member States to develop more supportive policy frameworks by specifying what kind of support energy innovations should receive and how different stakeholders should be involved.

More research is ultimately required to reveal how different policy frameworks, stakeholder constellations and multi-city collaboration may bolster local energy governance and help scale innovations more effectively.

Ethics statement

The authors declare that while no formal ethical approval was required by Danish law or Aarhus University to conduct the study, ethical and data security considerations were diligently observed during the research. All research participants received detailed information about the nature and purpose of the research, the intended use of their data, and their rights as participants, before providing appropriate informed consent in writing or on recorded audio.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the partners in the ACCESS project for their exceptional work. We are especially thankful to everyone involved in the pilot projects and to all our interviewees for their contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EU’s Interreg North Sea Programme under grant number 38-2-18-18.

Notes on contributors

Bernd Bonfert

Bernd Bonfert is an assistant professor (PhD Social Sciences and Management Sciences) at Aarhus University, Department of Environmental Science. His research focuses on social innovation, governance, stakeholder networks, and democratic participation in sustainable transitions, primarily in the fields of energy, agriculture and food, and diverse economies.

Helle Ørsted Nielsen

Helle Ørsted Nielsen is a Senior Researcher (PhD Political Science) at Aarhus University, Department of Environmental Science and Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on governance, policy integration and implementation, design of policy instruments and target group behaviour in the fields of energy, climate and environmental policy.

Anders Branth Pedersen

Anders Branth Pedersen is Senior Researcher (PhD, Political Science) at Aarhus University, Department of Environmental Science. His research is primarily centred on environmental policy analyses and environmental governance in a multi-level setting, including studies on network governance, on implementation barriers and on the effectiveness of environmental policies and policy instruments.

Notes

1 In P2P exchange, users either share energy produced by a collectively-owned source, or trade it via a collective platform that matches production and consumption according to their needs and contributions (Schneiders et al., 2022).

2 Throughout the paper, ‘local government’ and ‘local council’ refer to the main governing body of a municipality. In the case of Amersfoort, Mechelen and Malmö, the municipality covers individual cities, while in West Suffolk it covers a district with multiple towns.