Relevance of SSH in the energy transition

"Social sciences and humanities are deeply committed to the issue of energy transition, and the current international debate offers different theoretical and analytical frameworks developed to unfold the green energy transition.

As obvious, a particular effort is being made to address those challenges that affect the social sphere of our communities. The energy transition towards a more sustainable production and provision systems involves an incremental reshaping of the socio-material arrangements featuring local contexts and the related multilevel governance. This complex transformation is performed in a “hybrid world” in which the hard side (objectivity, techno-science, materiality) is tightly intertwined with the soft one (subjectivity, politics, values). Actually, very often sustainability is a problem more than a solution in itself and needs to be investigated in order to grasp how this hybrid configuration performs the transition in practice, and how civil society and political actors are pursuing it.