Workshop: Local Communities and Social Innovation for the Energy Transition

Local communities have a huge and often neglected potential for the development of social innovation initiatives that can foster the energy transition. This disregard is mainly due to how current research and policy approaches dealing with this transition mostly aim to substitute technologies and change individual behaviours. In this way, they miss taking into account the huge opportunities generated by jointly dealing with supply and demand, notably by a more democratic and holistic re-organisation of (energy) production and consumption practices and, more in general, of social practices related e.g. to mobility, shopping, eating, housing, etc.. Despite the usually quite limited energy impact of single initiatives, community-led social innovation initiatives can contribute to exploit this potential in important ways. They can overall foster decarbonisation on the large scale through innovation actions that are highly diversified and that can in principle flourish all around the world even without being specifically designed to target energy production and consumption.

The workshop aimed at a) studying the local communities’ social innovation potential for the energy transition under both a theoretical and practical lens and b) formulating policy and research recommendations allowing better exploiting this potential.