Beyond Technological Determinism: Energy Communities, Social Economy and the Policy Debate on Distributed Transition in Italy

The energy transition is still widely treated as technological substitution, yet its social outcomes depend on the local ecosystems that turn new devices into new relations. This article reads renewable energy communities as a field of social innovation and asks under what conditions local ecosystems generate and sustain it. Italy is analysed as a single, critical case: of the Member States audited by the European Court of Auditors, it alone had transposed all European provisions on energy communities. The case combines the regulatory and funding trajectory since 2018, national data from the Gestore dei Servizi Energetici (GSE), and three illustrative examples of unequal evidentiary strength at the regional, metropolitan, and inter-municipal scale. By the end of 2025, 1805 configurations of all types were in operation, but collective self-consumption had spread as a contractual form requiring little organisation, and in Emilia-Romagna most legally constituted communities had not reached operation. In the examples, public administrations acted as intermediaries, mobilising relational, cognitive and institutional proximity; that this helps operating communities acquire social content is a proposition to be tested. A framework linking forms of energy sharing to mitigation, adaptation and proximity shows what incentives calibrated on shared energy do not reward.