Challenges Ahead: Understanding, Assessing, Anticipating and Governing Foreseeable Societal Tensions to Support Accelerated Low-Carbon Transitions in Europe

Addressing global climate change calls for rapid, large-scale deployment of renewable energy technologies (RETs). Such an accelerated diffusion constitutes a new phenomenon, which challenges existing analytical approaches. The implied fundamental reconfiguration of energy systems will inevitably involve adjoining shifts in the structure of energy markets, the socio-cultural significance of energy and related rules and institutions—producing new societal tensions that are largely understudied. This chapter draws on insights from socio-technical, social-ecological and techno-economic systems studies to better understand, assess and support the exploration of low-carbon futures. We sketch out an agenda that encompasses four major tasks for governing the energy transition: i) a richer understanding of the dynamics of socio-technical and social-ecological systems; ii) multidimensional assessments of prospective environmental, social and economic impacts of these transformations; iii) methods that enable actors to anticipate future impacts in their everyday innovation and decision practices; and iv) elaborate new governance arrangements to tackle the upcoming transformations.