A social engagement Fast Track on Energy Communities-Key Lesson Learned from H2020 EU Projects

Energy communities organise collective and citizen-driven energy actions that will help pave the way for a clean energy transition, while moving citizens to the forefront. The energy market is rapidly transforming and so is the role of the consumer. Yesterday’s passive consumers become central actors in today’s energy markets. Today, as prosumers, citizens can benefit from their generation, consumption, and storage capabilities. Moreover, by supporting social engagement and citizen participation, energy communities can help provide flexibility to the electricity system through demand response, storage, and peer-to-peer energy exchange. Based on the collective debate from nine H2020 running projects (Renaissance, COMETS, Sender, eCREW, Lightness, ReDream, HESTIA, UP-STAIRS and NRG2peers), several challenges and key lessons learned can be identified for just social engagement. These challenges and lessons are relevant for the present and future development of EU energy communities

Innovation challenges of utilities in informal settlements : Combining a capabilities and regime perspective

The provision of basic services is falling short in informal settlements of cities in the Global South. In particular, public utilities have had difficulties expanding their services to the urban poor. Why is this the case despite utilities having improved their capabilities substantially over the last years? This paper investigates how innovation strategies of utilities are aligned or misaligned with the broader contexts in informal settlements, which are populated by different socio-technical regimes. We propose a framework to identify new capabilities needed by utilities to deal with these different regimes. The paper reconstructs pro-poor initiatives of a water and sewerage utility in a large East-African city and explains why they tended to fail in terms of livelihood improvement. We show how the alignment between capability portfolios and specific regime structures have set limits to the success of pro-poor innovation strategies in informal settlement contexts

Innovation challenges of utilities in informal settlements: Combining a capabilities and regime perspective

The provision of basic services is falling short in informal settlements of cities in the Global South. In particular, public utilities have had difficulties expanding their services to the urban poor. Why is this the case despite utilities having improved their capabilities substantially over the last years? This paper investigates how innovation strategies of utilities are aligned or misaligned with the broader contexts in informal settlements, which are populated by different socio-technical regimes. We propose a framework to identify new capabilities needed by utilities to deal with these different regimes. The paper reconstructs pro-poor initiatives of a water and sewerage utility in a large East-African city and explains why they tended to fail in terms of livelihood improvement. We show how the alignment between capability portfolios and specific regime structures have set limits to the success of pro-poor innovation strategies in informal settlement contexts

Towards sustainable urban basic services in low-income countries : A Technological Innovation System analysis of sanitation value chains in Nairobi

The provision of basic services suffers from a multitude of sustainability challenges in many cities of low-income countries. Sanitation provision faces particular challenges in the form of environmental contamination, high costs, and large inequalities among urban residents. In recent years an increasing number of innovations in on-site systems have been developed, which have not yet evolved into fully functional alternatives to the existing regimes. We study three prominent recent on-site sanitation initiatives in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya that aimed at developing entire “sanitation value chains”, which we conceptualize as an emerging Technological Innovation System (TIS). The analysis leads us to propose alternative governance modes for the TIS to overcome system failures such as capability, coordination and institutional barriers. Conceptually, the paper extends conventional TIS analyses towards entire value chains, enabling a wide range of transition processes to be addressed beyond informal settlements and low-income countries

Innovation system formation in international development cooperation: The role of intermediaries in urban sanitation

The transformation of urban basic service sectors towards more sustainability is one of the ‘grand challenges’ for public policy, globally. A particular urgent problem is the provision of sanitation in cities in low-income countries. The globally dominant centralised sewerage approach has proven incapable to reach many of the urban poor. Recently, an increasing number of actors in international development cooperation has started to develop alternative safely managed non-grid approaches. We approach their efforts as an emerging ‘global innovation system’ and investigate how its development can be supported by systemic intermediaries. We analyse the activities of the ‘Sustainable Sanitation Alliance’, an international network that coordinates activities in the sanitation sector and thereby supports this innovation system. The findings show how demand ing it is to fulfil an intermediary role in a global innovation system, because of the need to consider system processes at different scales, in each phase of system building

Analysing transition pathways in developing cities: The case of Nairobi\u27s splintered sanitation regime

Today\u27s rapid global urbanization highlights the need for long-term transformations of basic service sectors in developing cities in order to improve the livelihoods of the urban poor. Sustainability transitions frameworks have proven fruitful for addressing these sort of challenges. However, they have been at pains so far in accounting for the heterogeneity and complexities that typically characterize informal settlements in the Global South. We therefore propose a conceptual framework that extends the conventional analysis of socio-technical regimes by distinguishing the two levels of sectoral regime and service regime. Challenges for sustainability transitions may then be identified by missing alignments within and among the two regime levels. The framework is applied to the sanitation sector of Nairobi, Kenya, a city experiencing rapid population growth and a highly uneven provision of basic services. Drawing on a set of 152 in-depth interviews, observations, and five focus group discussions, the paper reconstructs the prevailing service regimes and shows how they suffer from misalignments and dysfunctionalities creating all sorts of problems at a sectoral level. We conclude that Nairobi\u27s sanitation sector can best be characterized as representing a splintered regime. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the new conceptualization of socio-technical regimes suggests some new sustainable transition pathways and how this framework might also be instructive for transition challenges in cities of the Global North

Analysing transition pathways in developing cities : The case of Nairobi's splintered sanitation regime

Today's rapid global urbanization highlights the need for long-term transformations of basic service sectors in developing cities in order to improve the livelihoods of the urban poor. Sustainability transitions frameworks have proven fruitful for addressing these sort of challenges. However, they have been at pains so far in accounting for the heterogeneity and complexities that typically characterize informal settlements in the Global South. We therefore propose a conceptual framework that extends the conventional analysis of socio-technical regimes by distinguishing the two levels of sectoral regime and service regime. Challenges for sustainability transitions may then be identified by missing alignments within and among the two regime levels. The framework is applied to the sanitation sector of Nairobi, Kenya, a city experiencing rapid population growth and a highly uneven provision of basic services. Drawing on a set of 152 in-depth interviews, observations, and five focus group discussions, the paper reconstructs the prevailing service regimes and shows how they suffer from misalignments and dysfunctionalities creating all sorts of problems at a sectoral level. We conclude that Nairobi's sanitation sector can best be characterized as representing a splintered regime. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the new conceptualization of socio-technical regimes suggests some new sustainable transition pathways and how this framework might also be instructive for transition challenges in cities of the Global North

Analysing transition pathways in developing cities : The case of Nairobi's splintered sanitation regime

Today's rapid global urbanization highlights the need for long-term transformations of basic service sectors in developing cities in order to improve the livelihoods of the urban poor. Sustainability transitions frameworks have proven fruitful for addressing these sort of challenges. However, they have been at pains so far in accounting for the heterogeneity and complexities that typically characterize informal settlements in the Global South. We therefore propose a conceptual framework that extends the conventional analysis of socio-technical regimes by distinguishing the two levels of sectoral regime and service regime. Challenges for sustainability transitions may then be identified by missing alignments within and among the two regime levels. The framework is applied to the sanitation sector of Nairobi, Kenya, a city experiencing rapid population growth and a highly uneven provision of basic services. Drawing on a set of 152 in-depth interviews, observations, and five focus group discussions, the paper reconstructs the prevailing service regimes and shows how they suffer from misalignments and dysfunctionalities creating all sorts of problems at a sectoral level. We conclude that Nairobi's sanitation sector can best be characterized as representing a splintered regime. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the new conceptualization of socio-technical regimes suggests some new sustainable transition pathways and how this framework might also be instructive for transition challenges in cities of the Global North

Innovation challenges of utilities in informal settlements: Combining a capabilities and regime perspective

The provision of basic services is falling short in informal settlements of cities in the Global South. In particular, public utilities have had difficulties expanding their services to the urban poor. Why is this the case despite utilities having improved their capabilities substantially over the last years? This paper investigates how innovation strategies of utilities are aligned or misaligned with the broader contexts in informal settlements, which are populated by different socio-technical regimes. We propose a framework to identify new capabilities needed by utilities to deal with these different regimes. The paper reconstructs pro-poor initiatives of a water and sewerage utility in a large East-African city and explains why they tended to fail in terms of livelihood improvement. We show how the alignment between capability portfolios and specific regime structures have set limits to the success of pro-poor innovation strategies in informal settlement contexts

Towards sustainable urban basic services in low-income countries: A Technological Innovation System analysis of sanitation value chains in Nairobi

The provision of basic services suffers from a multitude of sustainability challenges in many cities of low-income countries. Sanitation provision faces particular challenges in the form of environmental contamination, high costs, and large inequalities among urban residents. In recent years an increasing number of innovations in on-site systems have been developed, which have not yet evolved into fully functional alternatives to the existing regimes. We study three prominent recent on-site sanitation initiatives in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya that aimed at developing entire “sanitation value chains”, which we conceptualize as an emerging Technological Innovation System (TIS). The analysis leads us to propose alternative governance modes for the TIS to overcome system failures such as capability, coordination and institutional barriers. Conceptually, the paper extends conventional TIS analyses towards entire value chains, enabling a wide range of transition processes to be addressed beyond informal settlements and low-income countries