From Conflict to Consensus? Discourses on German Energy Transition

The German Energiewende, a process of fundamental policy change, has been the subject of intense public and expert debates over decades. The research presented in this book explores these debates from a discourse analytic perspective, drawing on narrative and framing theories and applying them in combination with different models of policy processes and actor coalitions.

The first part reconstructs two major antagonist discourses and their story-lines in German Federal Parliamentary debates – one calling for ambitious energy transition policies, the other more strongly oriented towards the fossil-nuclear status quo – and illustrates how they evolved and partly converged between 1989 and 2011. The second part investigates the role of scientific policy advice and finds that while scientific studies have tended to clearly take sides in the debate, they collectively facilitated convergence and consensus. The third part reveals a re-intensification of polarization between positions in the recent debate on coal reduction policies, but also locates scope for compromise with regard to future negotiations.

In summary, polarization between actors’ positions has not been an obstacle to the convergence of discourses, and the observed intensification of conflict in the future-of-coal debate is unlikely to make the long-grown consensus on energy transition disintegrate. More likely, affected actors will lobby for financial compensation and discursively delegate responsibility away from the national level. Thus, the future success of German energy transition will depend most strongly on whether solutions are found for an appropriate compensation of affected actors, and for a reconciliation of national level climate policies with supra-national action such as European Emissions Trading.