Citizen participation about energy policy is organized for substantive, normative and instrumental reasons. Myriad factors influence how these rationales and goals are shaped and attained. Of these factors the influence of the socio-political context in which participation is organized remains poorly understood, as most approaches to engaging society focus on discrete participatory events. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by providing insights into how the level of government at which participation about the energy transition is organized influences the goals and rationales of politicians, policymakers and citizens. Seven similar cases are compared – all based on the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method – in which 28,000 citizens advised their national, regional or local government about the sustainable energy mix. In all cases, most citizens worry about climate change and support sustainable energy objectives. However, different energy mixes are advised, and different values prevail in the motivations participants provided for their advice across multiple levels of government. Evaluative survey questions indicate citizens have more elaborate rationales and higher expectations when engaging in local participatory processes, which are most frequently criticized for their narrow scope. Finally, we observe local governments put most effort into satisfying multiple rationales for conducting participatory processes, based on 6 group discussions and 6 interviews with involved politicians and policymakers. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of the observed gap between citizen and government rationales across multiple levels of governments, arguing there is a need for aligning participatory processes in meaningful and effective participatory repertoires spanning across levels of government.

The installation of wind turbines and solar parks in valued rural landscapes has led to local concerns and perceived injustices to the extent that the societal acceptance of the energy transition is at stake. Although the literature on energy justice is blooming, research into citizens' understandings of justice with regards to regional energy transitions is rare. This paper examines the aspects citizens consider relevant when discussing a just energy transition in a regional context. Eleven focus groups, including 42 participants with various backgrounds, were conducted in four cities in the province of Overijssel, the Netherlands. The results show that citizens express justice claims by referring to spaces, places, and scales both within and beyond the region. From the perspective of citizens, regional energy transitions are both influenced by, and have an impact on, existing socio-spatial inequalities at multiple levels, ranging from households to the entire world. Citizens also acknowledge that energy policies and changes made at one scale can create injustices at other scales, referring to the different impacts national subsidies have on rich and poor neighborhoods, or to different effects of implementing renewable energy facilities on rural landscapes and urban regions. Our findings illustrate the multi-scalar character of justice concerns in regional energy transitions. A better understanding of the spatial justice considerations that are fundamental to the concerns of citizens can help improve policy processes and communication about regional energy transitions.

Transdisciplinary research is commonly understood as a research collaboration between different academic disciplines and actors from different sectors of society to co-produce knowledge needed in addressing real-world problems. In this paper, we understand transdisciplinary research as an epistemological object and study how researchers conceptualize it through visualization. To do this, we analyzed a set of related visuals in their textual context published over the last 20 years. This multi-modal analysis shows that transdisciplinarity in our set has, throughout the years, consisted of three main categories: science, practice, and the transdisciplinary research process. Transdisciplinary research has been visualized as a stable double-joint cyclical narrative starting in the settings of science and practice, after which actors join to collaborate, both depart with the results of collaboration. An assumed principle is continuously and implicitly visualized: the idea and ideal that science and practice are contributing, collaborating, and reaping benefits on the basis of equality. Supported by the literature, we problematize this way visuals obscure imbalances in practice. Finally, we discuss how visuals mean and what other ways of conceptualizing an epistemic object like transdisciplinary are possible.

The transition to a decarbonized energy system requires the adoption of climate policy in sectors such as buildings, industry, and transport. This climate policy integration is subject to political processes, but there is a lack of empirical investigations on how these political processes take place and which drivers shape integrative policy change. We address these gaps by conducting an empirical analysis of the 2024 recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) of the European Union (EU), a part of the “Fit for 55” program aimed at integrating climate change mitigation into building policy. Specifically, we ask (1) how did levels of climate policy integration evolve in the policy process and (2) what were the drivers of changes in these levels? Based on a qualitative case study research design, we analyzed six interview transcripts, thirteen policy documents, and 59 newspaper articles. We find that the EPBD represents a significant increase in integration of climate policy with regards to policy objectives and policy instruments, but only a minor increase of integration in governance capacities. Levels of integration differed between policy venues and changed during the policy process, because of issue salience and political leadership. We suggest further research to investigate the role of interlinkages of these drivers for integration processes and derive as a policy implication that policy integration levels need integrative capacities at all stages of the policy process.

Since 2017 we have taught a spring school on interpretive political science via the National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton. In this chapter, we reflect on the challenges and rewards. We think the event has four values. First, it is a 'safe space' that reassures uncertain or conflicted newcomers of the legitimacy of this craft. Second, it offers catharsis, allowing participants to express fears and doubts about pursuing a research career. Third, it helps participants to begin building a network of like-minded but equally isolated colleagues across disparate institutions and countries. Last, it helps pass on experiential knowledge, not just tools. Its key value, in other words, lies in its capacity to support the interpretive study of politics and policy (see Schwartz-Shea 2021; Wagenaar and Bartels forthcoming). At heart, we believe that structured training opportunities are a key means of preserving this important craft.

Climate change is a heated discussion topic in public arenas such as social media. Both texts and visuals play key roles in the debate, as they can complement, contradict, or reinforce each other in nuanced ways. It is therefore urgently needed to study the messages as multimodal objects to better understand the polarized debate about climate change impacts and policies. Multimodal representation models such as CLIP are known to be able to transfer knowledge across domains and modalities, enabling the investigation of textual and visual semantics together. Yet they are not directly able to distinguish the nuances between supporting and sceptic climate change stances. This paper explores a simple but effective strategy combining modality fusion and domain-knowledge enhancing to prepare CLIP-based models with knowledge of climate change stances. A multimodal Dutch Twitter dataset is collected and experimented with the proposed strategy, which increased the macro-average F1 score across stances from 51% to 86%. The outcomes can be applied in both data science and public policy studies, to better analyse how the combined use of texts and visuals generates meanings during debates, in the context of climate change and beyond.

In response to a growing understanding that scientific knowledge is not always trusted at face value, many universities organise dialogues to ‘open up’ to society. In four exploratory case studies at the Dutch Wageningen University & Research, we looked into the adherence to dialogue principles and the roles that researchers performed while engaging in dialogues. We found that researchers face three challenges when interacting with societal stakeholders in dialogues: (1) moving from knowledge provider to “letting in” and listening to different perspectives (2) balancing attention toward knowledge with attention toward values and emotions (3) navigating different aspired and perceived roles of researchers in dialogue (e.g. Pure Scientist versus Issue Advocate).

Three decades after the argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning, interpretive approaches have become part of mainstream policy analysis. Increasingly, researchers work within these traditions. Researchers new to these approaches might struggle to make conceptual and methodological choices. We therefore compare three prominent interpretive approaches: discourse analysis, framing analysis and narrative analysis. Discourse analysis is the study of hegemonic, dominant and recessive discursive structures. It explores how power is embedded in language and (re)produces dominant social structures. Framing analysis involves studying processes of meaning construction. It explores what elements of reality are strategically or tacitly foregrounded or backgrounded in conversations and text, and how this includes and excludes voices, ideas and interests in policy and decision-making. Narrative analysis investigates the work of storytelling. It explores how people make sense of events through the selection and connection of story elements: events, settings and characters. These approaches share ontological and epistemological starting points, but offer different results. In this paper, we show what they each contribute to critical policy analysis and develop a heuristic for selecting or combining approaches. We give a renewed entry point for interpretive work and contribute to dialogs on commonalities and differences between approaches

Decarbonization of the energy system to combat climate change poses a significant challenge for the Netherlands, often attributed to carbon lock-in: a persistent dependence on fossil fuels shaped by historical forces. Carbon lock-in also occurs at the discursive level, which is why research on sustainability transitions increasingly explores discourses as a crucial element for change. Our research contributes to this knowledge by exploring how counternarratives shape the discursive dynamics surrounding the fossil fuel industry's role in the Dutch energy system. Using an interpretive approach, we examine how the role of Shell, as the ‘epitome’ of the Dutch fossil fuel industry, is framed by both Shell itself and three discursive agents opposing fossil fuel-based pathways. To this end, we reconstruct the counternarratives by Friends of the Earth NL, Follow This, Code Rood and Shell around how they envision the role of Shell in the Dutch energy system, with the goal to identify how discursive agents position their narratives vis-à-vis each other and if coalitions are formed. Our findings reveal that discursive agents deploy a variety of strategic practices to increase the successful reproduction of their narratives: first, Code Rood strategically adopts a radical narrative that stimulates imagination, polarizing the discursive struggle surrounding Shell's role in the energy system. Second, Follow This strategically adopts a marginal narrative, designed to persuade incumbents of alternative interpretations, especially to rethink the profitability of fossil fuels. Third, Friends of the Earth NL and Follow This enhance their discursive agency through coalition building. Since unlocking institutionalized discourses becomes more important, further research should shed light on discursive dynamics within the institutionalized discourse. By offering insights into the pivotal role(s) of counternarratives in instigating discursive change, this study contributes to the growing body of knowledge crucial for accelerating the shift toward a decarbonized energy system.

The influence of visualizations on decision-making about controversial policy issues is increasingly recognized in the political and policy sciences. In this paper, we explore how combinations of visuals and text on Twitter (now X) lead to the formation of networks of actors sharing similar textual and visual framings about a policy issue in an online setting, which we conceptualize as Multimodal Online Discourse Coalitions (MODCs). MODCs struggle over the meaning of contested policy issues. We examine multiple MODCs in 2018 in the context of the regulatory decisions in that year about CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology in the USA, Mercosur, and the EU. Based on an SNA and a qualitative visual and discursive analysis in three languages on Twitter in 2018 (covering in total ~ 427 k Tweets), we show that MODCs in English and Spanish focused on technocratic aspects of CRISPR-Cas, resembling the regulatory decisions in the USA and Mercosur. In Europe, next to technocratic MODCs, an MODC in French formed around ethical/normative framings of the consequences of CRISPR-Cas applications, using visuals of embryos to represent “GMO babies.” These visuals were emotional triggers in their framing of CRISPR technology. The ethical/normative framing reflected the argument brought to the CJEU by a group of French actors involved in the court case which categorized CRISPR-Cas as a GMO technology in the EU. These results suggest that the French MODC and their visualization was of influence on the EU decision-making process; however, more research is needed to verify the role of this online debate in the decision-making process.

Since Rein and Schön developed their approach to policy framing analysis in the1990s, a range of approaches to policy framing have emerged to inform our understanding of policy processes. Prior attempts to illuminate the diversity of approaches to framing in public policy have largely “stayed in their lane,” making distinctions in approaches within shared epistemic communities. The aim in this paper is to map different approaches to framing used in policy sciences journals, to articulate what each contributes to the understanding of the policy process, and to provide a heuristic to aid in deciding how to use the diverse approaches in framing analysis and to further the dialogue across different approaches. To develop the heuristic, we manually coded and analyzed 68 articles published between 1997 and 2018 using “frame” or “framing” in their title or abstract from four policy journals: Critical Policy Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Policy Sciences, and Policy Studies Journal. We identified five approaches, which we label: sensemaking, discourse, contestation, explanatory and institutional. We have found that these approaches do not align with a simple binary between interpretive and positivist but show variation, particularly along the lines of aims, methodology and methods. In the discussion, we suggest that these five approaches raise four key questions that animate framing studies in policy analysis: (1) Do frames influence policies or are policies manifestations of framing? (2) What is the role of frame contestation in policy conflict? (3) How can the study of frames or framing reveal unheard voices? And (4) how do certain frames/framings become dominant? By introducing these questions, we offer a fresh way scholars might discuss frames and framing in the policy sciences across approaches, to highlight the distinct yet complementary ways they illuminate policy processes.

Policymakers in the European Union embrace collaborations of businesses, governments, and academia to develop a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. These so-called Triple Helix clusters aim to stimulate innovation and learning. However, Triple Helix collaborators also face conflicting perspectives on the desirability and directionality of the bioeconomy transition, either within a cluster or with societal actors affected by a cluster’s innovations. While previous Triple Helix research focussed on how to broaden the cluster collaboration towards a more inclusive range of actors to handle such contestations, we study how cluster partners deal with uninvited input from societal actors that do not form part of a cluster. We conceptualize this input as societal back talk and distinguish organizational hearing, listening, and learning capabilities to explore how back talk contributes to innovation in three bioeconomy clusters in the Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland. Our qualitative case study analysis is based on interview transcripts, newspaper articles, and policy and planning documents. Results indicate that collaborating partners generally do not hear uninvited back talk that fundamentally challenges their tacit beliefs, because partners focus on informing the public about what they consider techno-economic benefits of their projects. As a consequence, collaborators become ‘insiders’, which hinders listening to divergent problem definitions and alternative solutions of ‘outsiders’. Learning from uninvited back talk is therefore restricted to minor adjustments. To avoid innovative solutions remaining unexplored as a result of this discursive lock-in, Triple Helix collaborators must engage in hearing and listening to critical societal actors by establishing a reflective, two-directional dialogue.

Numerous research efforts have centered on identifying the most influential players in networked social systems. This problem is immensely crucial in the research of complex networks. Most existing techniques either model social dynamics on static networks only and ignore the underlying time-serial nature or model the social interactions as temporal edges without considering the influential relationship between them. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective of modeling social interaction data as the graph on event sequence, as well as the Soft K-Shell algorithm that analyzes not only the network’s local and global structural aspects, but also the underlying spreading dynamics. The extensive experiments validated the efficiency and feasibility of our method in various social networks from real world data. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind.

To realize sustainability transitions, there is a need for broad societal support. A study now shows that images can be influential in building that support, even in the case of policy decisions to invest in greener urban transportation, which more sceptical citizens would typically not endorse.