Towards a deeper understanding of up-scaling in socio-technical transitions: The case of energy communities

The pressing nature of the climate crisis is placing sub-national action at the forefront of climate mitigation. Energy communities have been an example of such niche action, as, over the past decades, they have blossomed in number and have challenged dominant narratives of the energy transition. The aggregate impact such action promises may be necessary to mitigate the global-scale problem of the climate crisis. This opens up the vexing question of what mechanisms are at play in scaling such action and how the contours of causality may be painted in the pathways towards transitions. This article aims to address this gap by building on the concept of mechanismic thinking. The innovative nature of this approach helps us identify empirical examples of conditions of scaling and brings conceptual clarity to studying processes of transitions. This article identifies conditions in relation to various pathways of transitions and the strategic management of niches. We identify several conditions that scaling may depend on through a systematic literature review of the energy community literature. From our review, two key results surface: Firstly, at the empirical level, the conditions identified suggest that a diversity of pathways to scaling may exist in parallel. Secondly, the conditions found in the literature can productively be mapped based on three dimensions: conditions internal to communities, conditions affecting interactions between communities, and finally, conditions related to the context of community initiatives. By feeding back our findings into leading theories in the field, our review enriches existing accounts of niche-internal dynamics of the strategic niche management approach. Moreover, we suggest that mechanismic thinking has much to add to the research agenda on connecting local scale innovation and higher scale impact in socio-technical thinking.