Three Essays on Addressing Conflicts and Consensus during Energy Transitions

Addressing the current climate crisis becomes more urgent, but also controversial. This is because the move toward a renewable energy system tends to produce new winners and losers by generating disproportionate outcomes across different stakeholders. Given this context, more actors and organizations are engaged in the policymaking process of energy transitions while competing or cooperating to defend their interests and values. Therefore, it is pivotal to understand these dynamic interactions to achieve a just transition based upon energy justice. This research thus strives to respond to this research question: How can different coalitions and stakeholders reach consensus by mitigating tensions in the course of` energy transitions? Although a growing body of public engagement studies addresses these dynamic interactions, there is still a gap between public engagement and energy justice scholarship. Specifically, public engagement studies tend to employ the limited notions of energy justice without considering their interconnections. Thus, they cannot fully capture emerging tensions and synergies among competing stakeholders drawing from the diverse notions of energy justice. In this tendency, many scholars have focused on describing a rather simplified interaction between public engagement and energy justice under the assumption of a bi-dimensional relationship between policymakers and uniform policy recipients. This, in turn, makes it harder to understand how to resolve tensions by reaching consensus among various stakeholders in order to facilitate a just transition based upon energy justice. To address these challenges, this research includes two discourse coalition analyses based on the policymaking process of NY’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), in addition to a critical literature review on public engagement in energy transitions from the perspective of energy justice. The first paper combines discourse coalition analysis with the three core framing tasks to capture the shared assumptions across different coalitions. The second paper integrates discourse analysis with the interactive framework between procedural and distributional energy justice to show tensions within both energy justice concepts as well as how to resolve these tensions. The third paper connects public engagement studies with six core themes of energy justice to demonstrate tensions and synergies emerging in energy transitions. This research, in turn, suggests more practical ways to reach consensus while mitigating tensions by: 1) Revealing how to create a transformative policy outcome (NY’s CLCPA) based on building shared assumptions rather than dominating over other coalitions, 2) Suggesting a more detailed way to attain synergy between procedural and distributional energy justice in a more practical context where different coalitions compete or cooperate 3) Identifying dynamic interactions among diverse energy justice concepts, which can be a conceptual basis for addressing crucial tensions emerging in public engagement during energy transitions. Consequently, this research identifies tensions and synergies among competing coalitions based on various notions of energy justice concepts. This better understanding of dynamic interactions among different stakeholders and diverse energy justice concepts, in turn, contributes to addressing various conflicts by informing policymakers of how and where to intervene to achieve a just transition with fewer conflicts in a timely manner.