In David Williamson, Gary Lynch-Wood and Agne Prochorskaite (eds), Research Handbook on Environmental Regulation. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026, pp. 130-142.
What is the role of adaptive regulation in enabling transitions to low-carbon energy systems? What insights can analysis of this important societal shift in turn offer regulatory theory? This chapter probes these intertwined questions, underpinned by scholarship on key concepts whose relationship it articulates and elaborates upon. These concepts are adaptive regulation, digitalisation, energy flexibility, user-centredness, just energy transitions, and energy communities, the last a culmination of the conceptual synthesis put forward. The chapter explains how energy communities present a necessary intervention for environmental regulators to enable through a reflexive approach to adaptive regulation, captured in the term ‘responsive organising’. This is explained in relation to the political actualisation of energy citizenship, through which users can exercise a fuller stake in the transition to low-carbon energy systems. This involves utilising incentives to drive interest and sanctions to overcome incumbency, alongside groundwork for energy community models to harness innovation and proliferate.
