Suchergebnisse

The article analyses how the standpoints of political parties on energy related issues are formed. The effect of the process of forming these standpoints on energy policy in general in the Czech Republic, the divergence among ideologies (coming out not only from the election programs), and other factors, as well as the parties' ideological continuity in time are particularly emphasized. The analysis comes to the conclusion that energy related issues are important for each political party but not crucial. In addition, it is concluded that parties are internally consistent, their standpoints are based on ideology, and they are all rather constructive in policy formulation. An interesting conclusion is also the fact that energy policy in the Czech Republic is generally highly personalized, thus strongly influenced by particular individuals.

The Visegrad Group ranks among the most visible examples of regional cooperation in Europe. Within the Group's agenda, cooperation on energy policy appears to be especially important and it is also a field in which the Platform is considered to perform especially well. This article provides an account of what 'energy cooperation' is according to the Platform itself. Specifically, it seeks to find out which energy policy issues are reflected by the Platform, how their reflection has evolved over time, and how they are framed (made sense of). To find out, all the official documents and communications issued by the V4 between 2000 and 2018, totalling approximately 660,000 words of text, were thoroughly examined using three separate analytical approaches. The results show that energy indeed features prominently in the V4 agenda with a focus on energy security – tacitly understood as security of (natural gas) supply – and pursuing common interests within the EU. The results also indicate that the energy cooperation is largely reactive, with the V4 much more likely to find common positions and agree on joint actions when facing external pressures. Especially since 2015, the cooperation has been chiefly defined by common resistance to the ambitious climate policies pursued by the EU. The article concludes by suggesting that Visegrad energy cooperation is likely overrated and that there is little evidence in the documents of the Platform that this agenda represents an 'especially successful' field of cooperation.

This article enriches the existing literature on the importance and role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in renewable energy sources research by providing a novel approach to instigating the future research agenda in this field. Employing a series of in-depth interviews, deliberative focus group workshops and a systematic horizon scanning process, which utilised the expert knowledge of 85 researchers from the field with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, the paper develops a set of 100 priority questions for future research within SSH scholarship on renewable energy sources. These questions were aggregated into four main directions: (i) deep transformations and connections to the broader economic system (i.e. radical ways of (re)arranging socio-technical, political and economic relations), (ii) cultural and geographical diversity (i.e. contextual cultural, historical, political and socio-economic factors influencing citizen support for energy transitions), (iii) complexifying energy governance (i.e. understanding energy systems from a systems dynamics perspective) and (iv) shifting from instrumental acceptance to value-based objectives (i.e. public support for energy transitions as a normative notion linked to trust-building and citizen engagement). While this agenda is not intended to be—and cannot be—exhaustive or exclusive, we argue that it advances the understanding of SSH research on renewable energy sources and may have important value in the prioritisation of SSH themes needed to enrich dialogues between policymakers, funding institutions and researchers. SSH scholarship should not be treated as instrumental to other research on renewable energy but as intrinsic and of the same hierarchical importance.