The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions: A comprehensive review

Increasingly, scholarly debates and policy developments on citizen participation in energy transitions have included calls for ‘energy democracy’ and active forms of ‘energy citizenship’. The concepts are tightly connected to the debate on energy transition, and the need for a decentralised energy system, based on renewable energy and increased local energy ownership. The two concepts exist in parallel and are sometimes used as synonyms and sometimes with clear distinctions made between them. This spurred an interest to systematically investigate them further. The aim of this paper is to identify similarities and differences between the two concepts and synthesise their contributions to debates on citizen participation in energy transitions. We review the literature thematically, finding that the concepts often refer to participation in domestic energy technologies, energy communities, energy transition movements, and energy policy. Energy citizenship tends to emphasise behaviour change and ways for individuals to participate in energy systems, thereby often focusing on individuals as agents of change. In contrast, energy democracy tends to focus on institutionalisation of new forms of participative governance and often placing collectives as central agents of change. The review also highlights some weaknesses of the literature: a bias towards decentralised energy systems, a lack of attention to representational democracy, and an underrepresentation of studies from outside Europe and North America.