Energy Research Governance in the European Union

Abstract

A major share of Europe’s knowledge about its incumbent energy cultures is pre-defined in closed spaces of negotiations. One such space are the negotiations surrounding the European Union´s research and innovation Framework Programmes, which are the focus of this thesis. With these programmes, the European Union not only funds energy research across Europe, but likewise produces guiding energy research narratives that act beyond their scope into the research agendas of its Member States. Energy research governance, considered as the wider scope surrounding the Framework Programmes negotiations in the European Union, takes place in hybrid spaces, were science and politics meet and are influencing each other, inheriting limiting, and enabling effects on both sides. This study aims to determine how these spaces are organised, who is participating under which conditions, and how decisions on energy research agendas and research funding conditions are taken. Therefore, this thesis enfolds the emergence history of energy policy, research policy and the governance of its overlap, namely energy research. It then examines in depth the negotiations that took place during the reform process of the Frame-work Programmes between its seventh and eighth repetition. The perspective of scientific, political and hybrid social worlds is taken to draw an encompassing picture of the situation of energy research governance of the European Union. The methodological background of this study is a situational analysis, which was conducted based on narrative expert interviews, participant observations and documents, drawing on sensitizing concepts from the fields of Science and Technology Studies, sociology, and political sciences. The investigated hybrid spaces revealed the importance of historical rooted (energy) re-search narratives, that are combined with a set of standards and standardized governance practices making the Framework Programmes a robust governance tool, despite changing political climates. Moreover, the role of so far largely overlooked boundary social worlds became apparent. Whereas strategies of narrative governance were found to be a structuring element across all social worlds and hybrid spaces. The newly developed continuum of implicatedness disclosed movements of visibility and agency among the participating negotiators of energy research governance. These results have in common that they bear diverse forms of ambivalences a collective, an individual or a group of collectives is confronted with. The author concludes that these the ambivalences must be met with strategies of disclosure and debate, rather than with vain attempts to resolve irresolvable contradictions