Sustainability research as inter- and trans-disciplinary activity: the case of German Energiewende

Sustainability research shall provide knowledge for action and is therefore deeply related with social and political issues such as regulation, behaviour, value-added chains, daily routines of users, consumption patterns, economic incentives, perceptions, attitudes and values. It needs cooperation with social actors in diagnosing sustainability deficits and challenges, in determining priorities for research and action, in defining indicators for measuring empirical developments and deciding on sustainability targets to go for, in setting the research agenda, in bringing knowledge and values of stakeholders and affected persons into the game and in looking for making sustainability strategies work in practice. This holds in particular for the transformation of the energy supply system to a more sustainable status. This transformation goes far beyond the substitution of traditional technology by new ones, because the energy system is not a purely technical system consisting of power plants, supply lines, storages etc. Rather it also includes a complex set of human actors such as users, regulators, decision-makers, planners, innovators, employees in the supply companies, citizens affected by side effects of energy technologies and infrastructures and also citizens in their role as the democratic sovereign. The main thesis of this paper is that the energy system is a socio-technical system and that its transformation is a social transformation including technological change but going far beyond. The German Energiewende is used as an example. Energiewende means the (relatively) fast transformation of the German energy infrastructure to a more sustainable status based on a high share of renewables and strongly increased energy efficiency, including an accelerated nuclear phase-out after the Fukushima disaster.