Measuring the EU democratic governance of energy transition: dimensions and indicators.

To help the EU reach its 2030 climate and energy targets, the Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union (EU Regulation 2018/1999) sets standard rules for planning, reporting, and monitoring in the member states. More specifically, it establishes that "member states should ensure the public effective opportunities to participate in and to be consulted on the preparation of the integrated national energy and climate plans" (C.28). In this regard, European member states should promote, directly and indirectly, the participation and inclusion of citizens, potential users, associations, and committees at various territorial levels as crucial drivers to increase energy policies' performance and assure the quality of democratic governance. Accordingly, this paper aims to detect to what extent member states involve parliamentary participation in energy planning, allow direct citizen involvement and stakeholders dialogue to ensure trust, legitimacy, and greater effectiveness of carbon neutrality policies. In this regard, we preliminary conduct a detailed literature review to analyze the buzz concept of 'energy democracy' (Szulecki, 2017, Van Veelen, D Van Der Horst, 2018), its potential, and limits at the EU level. Then the article provides an operational definition of the concept of "energy democracy" by defining the principal dimensions and measurable indicators to construct a new analytical framework of energy transition planning in European member states. Finally, the empirical research investigates the degree of democratization of Energy union governance in 27 Energy plans adopted by the European member states between 2020 and 2021 and ranks them according to the level of democratic energy governance.