Exploring the dynamics of energy democracy and institutional configurations

A mode of energy governance primarily led by communities and citizens — or community-based energy governance (CEG) — is widely envisioned as having the potential to transform energy governance to be more just and democratic. This mode of governance is intertwined with the way energy-related institutions are configured including the implementation of policy measures. While scholarly research has largely focused on the effects of institutional configurations in scaling up CEG projects, their role in shaping the transformative potential of CEG remains underexplored. Focusing on the case of Japan, this paper explores how the transformative potential of CEG is intertwined with the evolution of institutional configurations. In doing so, we employ an analytical perspective that views the transformative potential of CEG as a sequence of foregrounding disruptive imaginaries that incorporates what has been excluded, while also recognising its enmeshment with the evolving institutional configurations. By tracing the dynamics of (de/re)politicisation, we argue that although CEG projects in Japan have had various transformative imaginaries, the overall trend has gradually become depoliticised, enmeshed with specific events and shifts in institutional configurations. Specifically, following the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 and the introduction of the Feed-in Tariff scheme in 2012, CEG initiatives have increasingly become perceived as an economic actor capable of contributing to the circular flow within the local economy, while depoliticising some disruptive imaginaries that CEG projects have had. The depoliticisation, however, can partly be attributed to the CEG projects’ politicisation in practice, which has emphasised its citizen financing from the outset.