This thesis explores potential participatory approaches suitable for a municipal energy planning context. It also analyses the possibility of using those approaches in energy planning processes in ten Swedish municipalities. Swedish municipal energy plans display differences in terms of quality, comprehensiveness and implementation. According to participation literature, planning processes can be improved by stakeholder participation. This study was carried out in four steps: creation of a theoretical framework, survey investigating the municipal energy planners’ views on participation, relating the planners’ views with the theoretical framework and creating suggestions for which participatory approaches to use in the municipalities. Participatory approaches found in literature were categorised into: democracy based, social learning and policy driven participation. Literature states that stakeholder participation should be done as early as possible in a process, but findings from the survey show that those municipalities that have come furthest in their planning process are the ones most interested in stakeholder participation. Indicating that energy planning processes need to gain a sense of maturity before it is even possible to think about involving other stakeholders. Another result shows differences in objectives, central values and targeted stakeholders between the different municipalities. One conclusion from this thesis is the importance for municipalities to understand their objectives for stakeholder participation, since objectives partly determines what kind of participatory approach that will be suitable to use in a given situation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-62198 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Ljung, Stina |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Tema vatten i natur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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