E-SKA - horizontally scaling successful cooperations for the energy transition

A large part of the energy transition is already taking place at the local and regional level. 100% renewable energy regions, solar cities, master plan municipalities and many other pioneers show that municipalities and local actors can and want to make their contribution and in some cases even exceed the ambitions at the federal level. But in order for the whole of Germany to achieve its climate and energy policy goals, these individual successes must be spread across the country. Accordingly, regions, cities, and municipalities should increasingly be required to develop local solutions.

In addition to the pioneers, there are also many newcomers who are realizing that the energy transition is faced with numerous obstacles locally, such as capacity bottlenecks, scarce human and financial resources, as well as unclear or limited responsibilities, acceptance problems and conflicts of interest. In different contexts, these obstacles combine to form social dilemmas, such as the investor-user dilemma, the not-in-my-backyard syndrome or the free rider problem. The type and form of social dilemmas depends on the technology under consideration and on local social, political, administrative, economic and physical conditions. There are now many examples in which such dilemmas have been resolved through cooperation between state (districts, municipalities, cities) and non-state actors (including companies, citizens, clubs, associations) at the municipal level.

The E-SKA research project is the first to systematically record mechanisms of action and success factors that come into play in resolving dilemmas in the context of the energy transition locally. Building on this, we are developing and testing a new archetype-based approach for transferring successful energy transition cooperation to other, but similar, contexts between municipalities.

Against this background, the E-SKA project pursues two research questions: 

1. Under what conditions can obstacles and social dilemmas of the energy transition be overcome through cooperative strategies? 
2. Under what conditions can corresponding strategies and solutions be transferred to other municipalities or other energy transition projects?

To find the answers, E-SKA uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines political science, institutional economics, urban research and data science. Approaches from sociology and social psychology are also taken up, for example when it comes to defining responsibility diffusion, social dilemmas, social capital or acceptance issues. The focus of the analysis is the interaction of social, political, administrative, economic and technological-physical factors, which creates specific contexts in which obstacles and social dilemmas of the energy transition arise. Based on these contexts, E-SKA aims to identify strategies for successful cooperation.

In this context, successful means that social dilemmas have been addressed cooperatively, obstacles to local energy transition projects have been overcome and context-specific solutions for cooperative energy transition projects have been developed. In order to ensure the validity of the identified dilemmas and the broad applicability of this analysis, the project is placed on a broad empirical basis by creating a comprehensive database for Germany's municipalities from which dilemmas and, if necessary, their resolution can be diagnosed. Pioneers are also recorded and systematized in large numbers.

The ambition of the project does not end with identification, however. Rather, it is also intended to show ways in which these strategies can be transferred to other local contexts. This aspect of the project is based on the assumption that there are certain recurring patterns along which existing cooperation strategies for the implementation of energy transition projects can be scaled horizontally by bringing together municipalities with similar characteristics in order to learn from each other ("matching").

In this project, adelphi is investigating how conflicts could be resolved in specific situations and analyzing the political framework conditions that favor dilemmas in the context of the energy transition or cooperative behavior to resolve or alleviate dilemmas. Within this framework, we are building a database of positive examples of energy transition cooperation, supporting the development of the AI-supported transfer approach, tests on the scalability of the approach and the practical transfer of project results.