From little things, big things grow: Facilitating community empowerment in the energy transformation

The energy transformation provides an opportunity to take action on climate change and facilitate broader social transformation by enabling energy users to participate more meaningfully and benefit from the transition to renewable energy systems. However, to meet these twin objectives, communities need to be empowered to engage in the transformation. Empowerment in energy has typically been applied as a buzzword and has rarely been attained by communities. Where meaningfully applied, empowerment has often been considered an outcome of community engagement instead of both a process and outcome. This paper presents an empirical investigation of a conceptual framework of community empowerment in energy. Using three case studies of community renewable energy initiatives in Australia, it demonstrates that key enablers of empowerment contribute to specific empowerment outcomes. It shows that empowerment is facilitated by community members developing knowledge, skills and the capacity to work together. However, developing this capacity can only take communities so far on their empowerment journey. Attaining higher levels of empowerment is contingent upon fundamental shifts in power, supported by robust communities and supportive governing entities. However, the diffusion of empowerment is bounded by space and time. Thus, empowerment requires a combined effort from communities and governing entities.