Beyond Climate Leviathan: From Institutionalisation to Collective Action in Renewable Energy Communities
Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) have emerged as one of the most recent socio-technical innovations designed to respond to the climate crisis by fostering citizen participation in the energy system and strengthening social cohesion. Yet their rapid institutionalisation raises a central question:...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/tp, |
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
| Udgivet: |
Teoria politica
2026
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| Fag: | |
| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) have emerged as one of the most recent socio-technical innovations designed to respond to the climate crisis by fostering citizen participation in the energy system and strengthening social cohesion. Yet their rapid institutionalisation raises a central question: are RECs instruments of socio-ecological transformation, or are they mechanisms of assimilation within the existing energy apparatus? To address this question, the paper develops a critical theoretical framework combining Mann and Wainwright Climate Leviathan with the conceptual triad of community, commons, and commoning. Building on the recognition that the ecological transition has largely stalled, while fossil Behemoth is reasserting its dominance and the climate Leviathan shows signs of weakness, we argue that RECs occupy a hybrid and ambivalent space. Born within the institutional and regulatory logic of the Leviathan, they nonetheless retain the potential to act as spaces of politicisation, cooperation, and reappropriation of energy. To conceptualise this potential, we advance the notion of energy-in-common, articulated around five pillars (cum, munus, praxis of commoning, dépense, Gemeinwesen). This framework allows us to analyse and re-imagining RECs not merely as policy tools or market actors, but as possible loci of energy commoning. The article therefore interprets RECs as situated within the tension between assimilation and transformation: on the one hand, constrained by the techno-managerial apparatus of the Leviathan; on the other, capable of prefiguring trajectories towards X, a scenario in which energy becomes a field of collective action, ecological subjectivation, and socio-ecological justice. In conclusion, we suggest that RECs are not politically neutral devices but contested arenas, where commoning practices can challenge incumbent power relations and reconfigure the boundaries of the transition. While our analysis is primarily theoretical, it opens the way for future empirical research aimed at investigating how energy commoning manifests in practice, and under which conditions RECs may become genuine battlefields of socio-ecological transformation rather than functional devices of fossil restoration. |
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