Kacper Szulecki won the Award for the article Conceptualizing energy democracy. The prize-winning article can be downloaded for free until the end of 2019
The Editorial Board Jury describe their reasons for selecting this article:
“Dr. Szulecki’s article represents a tour de force effort to shape the academic and political agenda in the area of energy politics and democratic political theory. The article shows mastery in handling a diverse range of debates, concepts and thinkers to create an original approach and a new discourse with respect to energy democracy. It ambitiously steers energy discussions towards immensely important issues of popular sovereignty, participatory governance and civic ownership. We have no doubt of the current and future impact of the work and very much look forward to how Dr. Szulecki shapes this field in the future.”
Our prize-winning author Kacper Szulecki gives an insight into his outstanding article:
“The story of this paper goes back as far as 2013, when I worked in Berlin – certainly the place to be if you want to study the societal implications of an ongoing energy transition. Ever since, the idea of “energy democracy” seemed like a “spectre haunting Europe” – powerful, inspiring, but vague. Having a dual background in political science and sociology, I became interested not only in the ways in which we can design policies to bring about energy transition (the usual political science approach), but also what the socio-political consequences of energy transitions might be.
This article addresses some of those questions, as well as defending the notion “energy democracy” from sceptical readers, delineating this idea from its more popular older sibling “energy justice”, and hopefully – making it clearer, stronger, more coherent and analytically sharp”