Embedded, relational, and process-oriented:Understanding citizen engagement in energy transitions

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a theoretical framework that advances understanding of citizen engagement as embedded, relational, and processual, challenging conventional outcome-oriented approaches.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights for designing engagement processes that recognize local complexity and relational dynamics, avoiding superficial participation checklists.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need to address structural barriers and inter-actor relationships, rather than treating engagement as a tool for acceptance or legitimacy.

Citizen engagement is increasingly acknowledged as a cornerstone of successful energy transitions. Despite this widespread acknowledgement, dominant framings of citizen engagement remain narrow and strongly outcome-oriented. In both policy and academic contexts, engagement is frequently approached as something to be “checked of” or “carried out”, a procedural step in the transition process. Citizen engagement is thereby frequently conceptualized against the backdrop of what engagement is expected or supposed to achieve: for example smoother implementation, increased fairness and legitimacy, or the empowerment of citizens. Such outcome-oriented framings reduce engagement to a tool or aspirational goal, overlooking the complex and situated realities of citizen involvement. Crucially, they implicitly position citizens as external to the system, “them”, rather than as embedded actors whose roles, perspectives and agency are shaped by institutional, socio-technical, and relational contexts. When engagement is narrowly framed, (calls for) participation risk(s) becoming superficial, a mere checkbox exercise that fails to address deeper dynamics shaping citizen involvement. As such, narrow framings of citizen engagement remain ill-equipped to deliver on their promises, whether of acceptance, fairness, or democratic legitimacy, without a richer understanding of citizen engagement in practice. This dissertation responds to this by examining citizen engagement trough a combined analytical lens that foregrounds embeddedness, relationality, and process. It engages critically with three reoccurring concepts that foreground citizen engagement in energy transitions, yet often do so in reductive ways: community acceptance, energy citizenship, and local heat transition coordination in marginalized settings. The overarching question addressed is: How can citizen engagement be understood comprehensively, and what implications does this have for citizen engagement in energy transitions? Empirically, this research investigates engagement across heat, wind and solar energy transition contexts in the Netherlands. It draws on qualitative data from fifty-three stakeholders, including residents, across eleven case studies, covering a range of geographical contexts in the Netherlands: from rural to urban areas, and from marginalized to more affluent neighborhoods. Chapter 2 revisits community acceptance, addressing the persistent gap in understanding how engagement contributes to outcomes such as acceptance. Existing studies often conceptualize community acceptance as a static outcome rather than a dynamic process. This chapter reconceptualizes community acceptance as a dynamic process that emerges through interactions among multiple actors, each with different roles and perceptions towards various aspects of energy transitions. Rather than reducing acceptance to citizen resistance or support, the analysis demonstrates how acceptance emerges from a broader configuration of actors whose actions, perceptions, and relationships co-define the conditions for acceptance. By doing so, the chapter makes two key contributions. First, it shifts the analytical focus from acceptance as an outcome to an ongoing process, moving beyond static and citizen-focused understandings. Second, it shows that engagement plays a nuanced and conditional role in shaping acceptance. It shows that acceptance is not a straightforward outcome of participation, but a weighing process shaped by the interplay of actors, their roles, and their relationship to different objects of acceptance. By unpacking community acceptance the chapter provides a more grounded understanding of how engagement relates to acceptance, and unpacks assumptions and promises of outcome-oriented participation approaches. Chapter 3 examines assumptions embedded in dominant energy citizenship (EC) discourse. EC debates often presume that citizens can, and should, take on more active roles, and that insufficient engagement reflects a need for empowerment. Such framings reduce engagement to an abstract ideal or status to be achieved, while obscuring structural inequalities and contextual barriers that shape people’s actual ability to engage. This chapter challenges these assumptions by approaching EC as a process in the making, rather than as a normative status. Drawing on underrepresented contexts, it shows how citizens’ roles are embedded within institutional structures, shaped relationally, fluid over time, and co-constructed through interactions with others. Engagement is portrayed as context-dependent and extending beyond energy-related issues. Using a relational, embedded and process-oriented perspective, this chapter moves away from well-intended but restricted normative notions of EC, and reframes it as a diverse set of practices that reflect lived realities and structural conditions. This allows identification of the often-overlooked barriers that inhibit engagement, as well as recognition of alternative, less visible modes of agency. The chapter thus offers a more nuanced understanding of how energy citizenship comes about and relates to outcomes such as empowerment. Chapter 4 examines local heat transition coordination in marginalized neighborhoods. These contexts are frequently portrayed as “hard to coordinate,” with difficulties attributed to residents themselves. Such framings oversimplify citizens’ roles and obscure the relational dynamics and structural conditions that shape actors’ engagement and coordination. The chapter shows that engagement is underpinned by multiple, often conflicting, logics enacted by different actors. Meaningful engagement does not require full consensus, such alignment is often impossible, but rather the ability to navigate and negotiate those misalignments. Findings reveal how and why collective heat transitions often stall, particularly in marginalized settings: misalignments emerge across and within multiple actor groups, both substantively and relationally. Challenges attributed to citizens prove to be part of broader inter-actor tensions. The chapter argues that improving coordination requires attention to transparency, time, and quality of relationships. In doing so, the chapter underscores both the potential and limitations of collective, locally driven transitions in marginalized neighborhoods. Chapter 5 reflects on an attempt to reshape the script of ‘doing’ engagement through a creative approach to engagement, beyond the academic domain. In doing so, it reflects on how predefined (thematic) domains or frames shape how engagement is researched and practiced, and demonstrates the value of experimenting with alternative modes of engagement that challenge these conventions. Together this dissertation makes two main contributions. Theoretically, it advances scholarship on citizen engagement in sustainability transitions by offering a relational, embedded, and processual perspective, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of how engagement is formed and negotiated. This understanding challenges assumptions underlying outcome-oriented framings, and identifies where and why the promises attached to it may fail to materialize. It shifts the focus from viewing citizens as a group to be “dealt with”, toward repositioning them as embedded actors whose capacity and willingness to engage are shaped by structural and relational realities. It thereby nuances dominant outcome-oriented framings and contributes to more reflexive, inclusive and realistic approaches to citizen engagement in energy transitions. Empirically, it foregrounds underrepresented contexts in the Netherlands and demonstrates concrete ways and methods to embed context and relationality in energy transition research. Ultimately, the findings emphasize the need to strengthen inter-actor relationships in order to move beyond superficial participation. They demonstrate that engagement should be understood not as a mechanism for achieving predetermines outcomes such as acceptance or empowerment, but as a practice of relating, one that contributes to more embedded, context-sensitive and durable forms of engagement.

• openalex https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/88615f73-7581-4401-8768-6e4de6db1ee2first seen 2026-05-15 17:18:14 · last seen 2026-05-17 04:30:08