Changing the game: Situating energy citizenship in the Dutch socio-technical landscape

The multilevel perspective (MLP) has made paramount theoretical contributions to transitions studies. However, it has been criticized for weakly considering individual agency. Using the energy transition as a case study, this paper asks how the energy citizenship literature can enhance current understandings of the ways individuals shape socio-technical transitions within the MLP framework. We use extensive interview data to simultaneously examine the cognitive and behavioral dimensions that drive energy citizens' engagement in energy transitions. Our findings indicate that individuals leverage the landscapes and regimes in different ways, which hold implications for socio-technical transitions. As such, individuality is a key and understudied issue within the MLP framework. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it contributes to the MLP framework by shedding light on an additional dimension - i.e., individuals - thereby enriching current knowledge of the dynamics of socio-technical transitions. Second, it uses primary data collected in the Netherlands that is sufficiently granular to take the individuality question to the next level.