Bricolage as an early-niche mechanism: Expectations and carbon lock-in in two Polish energy clusters

Energy transitions depend on socio-technical innovations such as energy communities, often studied where they are already well established. Far less is known about how such initiatives take shape before a recognisable niche and its protective structures have formed. Research on strategic niche management explains how niches develop once such structures exist, but says little about how actors assemble workable configurations before they do. To address this gap, we develop a framework built on three elements: carbon lock-in, which produces weak institutional support; expectations, whose shared goals and contested mechanisms steer actors towards locally specific experimental bets; and bricolage, the early-niche mechanism through which actors recombine institutional, material, and relational resources into provisional configurations under constraint. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study, we apply this framework to Poland's energy clusters, introduced in 2015 to support local collaborative energy production but largely stalled at a proto-niche stage, comparing two relatively successful cases. We find that the two clusters arrived at opposite working models — one engaging the incumbent regime, the other partly decoupling from it — as responses to competing expectations whose contestation signals the niche's immaturity. Across both cases, the work of bricolage reshapes what counts as a resource. Our central conceptual contribution is to specify bricolage as the mechanism through which place-based properties translate into transition pathways, advancing the place-based decarbonisation literature beyond the claim that place matters towards an account of how it matters: local infrastructure, relationships, and legal form shape which bricolage moves and expectations are possible.