Sustainable Energy Communities: Developing New Representations and Practices for the Italian Context

Public discourses on sustainable energy ideally fall within the area of a triangle defined by social representations of energy, energy governance and users. Therefore, full sustainability requires consumers to become citizens actively involved in participatory decision-making processes, renewable and diffused energy production and management (Devine-Wright, 2007). Drawing on these premises, ACCESI project aims to identify psychosocial factors that foster or hinder the development of proper sustainable energy communities in Italy. In the first phase of the project we explored how sustainable energy is socially constructed in Italian parliamentary debates and national press (years 2009-2012) (Sarrica, Brondi & Cottone, in press). The second phase of the project - that is the focus of this contribution - aims to deepen positive case studies in the management of energy issues. A qualitative mixed-method approach was adopted: texts from local political debates and newspapers, semi-structured interviews with key informants, visual and ethnographic data were collected and analysed. Results show that the proposed ‘triangular interpretative model’ of sustainable energy fits also local discourses on the issue: representations of energy, governance and users almost exclusively cover the contents of the discourses on sustainable energy. Production technologies enter these discourses crosswise and in unexpected ways. However, different interpretations of active cooperation between policy makers, stakeholders and citizens change the way in which representations of energy, management and citizens are put in relation one with the others: structural and cultural changes towards sustainability are enacted mainly when participation moves directly from the citizens.