More than five years after their formal recognition under the Clean Energy Package, energy communities remain marginal across the European Union. Drawing on participatory workshops and expert surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022 in six European countries within the Horizon 2020 EC2 project, this paper argues that the persistent gap between policy ambition and empirical reality is not an implementation failure but a structural symptom of institutional lock-in within a neoliberal regime of energy governance analysed through the lens of institutional economics and commons theory. The barriers facing energy communities - regulatory, financial, infrastructural, and participatory - converge across countries with radically different regulatory traditions, indicating a structural rather than a discrete policy failure; where outcomes persist despite instruments enacted to change them, we read this as path dependency. The paper's principal contribution is to reframe the central question of the field: from “why do energy communities fail?” to “what must the institutional environment provide for them to emerge?” We set out nine meta-institutional conditions, organised in three layers, which spell out what Ostrom's design principles presuppose, rather than state, about the surrounding institutional environment.
Factors that can make innovative technologies desirable for adoption, such as cost or safety, begin to take shape during the earliest research stages. Here, we develop a framework that helps researchers anticipate adoption risks and benefits that their technologies could face upon scale-up. The early-Stage Technology Evaluation for Adoption Risks (STEAR) worksheet incorporates 13 qualitative metrics from four risk areas – value proposition, market acceptance, resource maturity, and license to operate – as well as an action-oriented brainstorming guide to inspire impactful research directions. We apply STEAR to a case study of eight methanol production processes varying from commercial to lab scale, illustrating how the framework can identify challenges that might otherwise only emerge through extensive analyses such as techno-economic or life cycle assessment. Feedback from 17 subject matter experts further confirms that STEAR – despite limitations related to its qualitative nature and reliance on user assumptions – serves as a proof-of-concept tool for stimulating innovative thinking toward implementing technologies at scale.
Over the past two decades, energy policy debates have increasingly centered on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, accompanied by growing public investment in clean energy. Yet it remains unclear whether these shifts have diversified whose expertise policymakers draw on and which solutions receive the most attention. In this paper, I draw on political communication and sociological perspectives on expertise to examine how stakeholder representation and dominant themes have shifted in U.S. energy policymaking over this period. Combining a classification of speakers' affiliations with a structural topic model of nearly 4000 statements from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearings (1999–2024), I find that incumbent energy industries consistently outnumber clean technology firms among business witnesses, while both companies and industry associations appear less often over time. Clean technology companies remain a small share of business witnesses, although renewables and electrical vehicle companies appear more often in recent years. Senators of both parties emphasize similar themes, but Democratic majorities are associated with greater emphasis on renewables, energy and grid security, and energy efficiency. I find that clean technology firms tend to emphasize innovation policy and renewables, and incumbent firms focus more on fossil fuels and energy prices, a pattern that may partly reflect the themes on which certain actors are invited to testify. In an arena of limited carrying capacity, this matching of actors to themes may narrow the range of perspectives heard on energy solutions, even as the set of actors with a stake in the transition has expanded over time.
Products are increasingly labelled low-carbon, circular, or zero-emission. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) often provides the evidence behind such claims, and its results now inform regulation, certification, and procurement. But the same product system can be assessed in more than one defensible way. Methodological research seeks faithful representation of physical systems. Policy and market applications may also rely on accounting conventions that make claims communicable and governable. LCA has well-developed tools for numerical uncertainty, while existing quality frameworks only partly address the interpretive variability that arises when results become sustainability evidence. This article develops Reflexive LCA. The framework examines the claim conditions of an assessment: what sustainability claims a result can credibly support, and under what circumstances. Drawing on science and technology studies, it examines these conditions across four dimensions: representational, communicative, institutional, and epistemic. Two published cases illustrate the framework: an electric vehicle assessed under prospective decarbonization pathways in China, and a Norwegian zero-emission neighbourhood whose climate-neutrality claim depends on the electricity system against which its exported electricity is credited. When such claims circulate across policy and certification frameworks, methodological plurality can become a governance challenge because different configurations may support different claims and sustainability transition visions. Reflexive LCA complements harmonization by keeping assumptions and claim boundaries explicit and reviewable. It thereby strengthens interpretive robustness in LCA quality assurance.
Mission-oriented innovation policies are increasingly used to address complex societal challenges such as urban energy transitions. Yet little is known about how mission governance is enacted locally, particularly how transition teams calibrate directionality, organize participation, and foster stakeholder engagement. This study examines how transition teams govern the formation of local mission arenas. Based on participatory action research in Roeselare, Belgium, we compare three urban energy transition arenas: a heat network, hydrogen infrastructure, and social housing renovation. The findings show that balanced directionality, combining strategic orientation with interpretative openness, supports stakeholder alignment, engagement, and emerging coalition formation. Overly broad or overly prescriptive mission framing, by contrast, hinders alignment and commitment. Stakeholder engagement depends not on directionality or participation in isolation, but on how transition teams calibrate these governance mechanisms and align mission ambitions with local institutional and organizational conditions. The study advances mission-oriented innovation and sustainability transitions literature by providing an actor-centred perspective on mission governance. It conceptualises transition teams as hybrid governance orchestrators that balance strategic direction with collaborative flexibility. By distinguishing participation as a governance dimension from engagement as a governance outcome, it shows how directionality, participation, and temporal and institutional fit interact during mission arena formation. Practically, the findings offer insights for cities seeking to develop adaptive and inclusive governance arrangements for sustainability transitions.
