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Understanding the policy and governance as well as human and social implications of energy transitions plays a crucial role in ensuring the uptake of technologies and effectiveness of policy implementation. Call for papers - Special issue on policy and governance of energy efficiency Challenges surrounding energy consumption and energy efficiency remain complex which make effective policy formulation, decision-making and implementation a challenge in energy policy. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores Danish renewable energy policy and policymaking, focusing on the development of nearshore wind energy and the role played by various actors, their competing ideas, the discursive processes in which they participate, and the institutional settings where exchanges occur. The research employs a case study design, concentrating on the Vesterhav Syd nearshore windfarm project. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews, the paper exploits Discursive Institutionalism and one of its recent refinements, labelled Ideational Power that highlights power over, through and in ideas. The data gathered provides compelling evidence of the ways in which actors struggle for dominance, each seeking to persuade others of their preferred policy problem definition and solutions: a process that oscillates between highly technical coordinative discourses among government agencies and business organisations and more politicised communicative discourses among a wider set of actors that includes community groups. Significantly, this case reveals the power of various policy stakeholders in Danish energy policy, suggesting that once decisions are taken at the national level of governance to construct a windfarm, only limited influence can be exerted by local groups on the outcomes. Our findings raise wider questions about such processes beyond the Danish case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been growing interest in collaborative approaches such as co‐creation and co‐design for strategic energy planning and energy policy design. However, existing analyses have conceptualized collaboration in rather vague terms, have focused primarily on the involvement of industrial actors and have been set in Western Europe. In this paper, we assess an inclusive energy transition policy co‐design experiment in Ida‐Virumaa, a region in Estonia historically dominated by the oil shale industry and with scarce experience of cross‐sector collaboration to date. The experiment had a twofold purpose: (1) to establish a network of people interested in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the region, (2) to develop and validate proposals for policies that could accelerate the energy transition. We found that expectation alignment, social learning, resource mobilization and developmental evaluation can be used to create synergy among participants and can lead to innovative policy proposals. However, collaboration increases the time needed for policy development, the existence of alternative venues can undermine the collaborative process, fluid roles can create confusion around implementation and there might not be many resources to build on in old industrial regions. We conclude that it is still relatively easy to co‐design energy policy or a strategic energy plan even in a setting that does not enjoy a well‐developed collaborative culture but it is much more challenging to co‐create a strong network of committed actors with clear roles in the implementation of policies and plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) and environmental security are crucial for achieving sustainable development, yet their intersections remain largely unexplored. In this article, we combine these two approaches to examine renewable energy policies of the European Union (EU). The EU is a key actor championing sustainable development, often considered to be a ground breaker particularly in environmental policies. At the same time, the EU aims to be a significant global security actor, and it has also recognised the role of environmental change as a factor for security. In this article, we explore whether the EU coherently integrates the sustainable development dimensions (society, environment, economy) in its renewable energy policies through inductive and deductive content analysis of key policy documents. Our analysis shows that the EU's renewable energy policies are not fully coherent with all dimensions of sustainability, particularly with respects to societal considerations and impacts on third countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]