Local Authorities and Sustainable Energy Innovations: Decentralisation, Institutional Capacity and Civic Participation

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Both energy and political landscapes are changing in the UK, but so far no analysis has considered how these movements towards greater decentralisation relate to one another. Indeed, local authorities are becoming increasingly involved in enabling and providing sustainable energy programmes whilst, at the same time, many are applying for and securing devolution deals. Some scholars and policy analysts have argued that decentralising energy will be vital in securing popular buy-in to sustainable energy transitions through greater civic participation whilst others are point towards the power of the local in delivering better-attuned services. This research project will reveal the details of how these two decentralisation movements interact with one another in practice by exploring and mapping five local authority sustainable energy programmes and critically examining their relationships with central government. This research is timely and innovative. It is timely because according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), whose job it is to monitor the UK's progress on climate mitigation, the UK is at risk of missing its Fourth Carbon Budget and because central government support for solar and wind generation has also recently been cut (Energy Spectrum 2015). At the same time, however, local authorities have been emerging as one area of innovation with regard to sustainable energy, partly by creating new energy companies that operate according to non-traditional business models and partly by offering supply services focused on affordability. The project is innovative in that it combines conceptual insights from socio-technical transitions, political science and human geography to reveal the emerging role of local authorities in sustainable transitions whilst also exploring these changes within the context of political decentralisation. This project has been designed with input from Ofgem, the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) and two local government personnel. It aims to engage on a regular basis with practitioners and stakeholders at the local authority level with the intention of on-going knowledge exchange and co-production about this fast changing area. The project is also designed so that local authorities will have the opportunity to engage with one-another through a targeted, practitioners' workshop. Towards the end of the project findings about how local authorities and central government work together in practice, in particular with regard constraints and opportunities for improvement, will be shared with Ofgem, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and local authority networks such as the Local Government Association. The findings from this research project should be relevant not only to academics working on local government and local energy in the UK, but also to scholars interested in questions of scale and of civic participation in sustainable energy transitions. By undertaking and completing this project the PI will be given a valuable opportunity to develop and further improve her research skills, create new networks, produce groundbreaking research and to continue on her trajectory to becoming a world leader in the field of climate and energy governance.