Energy Transitions in Europe: At the Crossroads of Changing Political and Socio-Technological Paradigms

The section seeks to advance political science research and theorizing on energy transitions, which to date is dispersed between sub-disciplines. In line with the practice established by our sections at the ECPR General Conferences in Oslo (2017) and Hamburg (2018), the proposed section too places the emerging issues in energy politics into the spotlight and contextualizes them via exploring links to the existing empirical problems and introducing conceptual tools for accounting for them. The section deals with energy politics in the EU and, more specifically, with the transition towards low-carbon energy systems. Its primary focus are the trade-offs inherent to energy transitions such as the best climate solutions being at odds with what is best for the local environment or the periodic incompatibility of the means of climate policy with the goals of social policy. These problems are discussed against a wider background of the recent developments in implementation of energy transition policies and the overall scope of the section is further broadened by reflecting the recent shifts in European politics, namely the rise of right-wing populism and the question of further integration or disintegration in Europe. We propose an issue-based panel setup, where each session is dedicated to a particular empirical or theoretical problem which goes beyond energy studies, and should also be appealing to the general political science audiences: the apparent EU crisis, the rise of populism, policy fragmentation, EU’s external policymaking, interdependence and policy diffusion, societal acceptance for new infrastructure, and finally energy poverty/social justice, concluded with a roundtable discussion on the identity of political science energy research.