Energy communities and commons: rethinking collective action through inhabited spaces
Résumé
The emergence of energy communities, in the form of citizen coming together for the sharing of in situ renewable energy production and consumption, deserves to be questioned not only from the technical or environmental point of view, but also societal and political. If energy can - and must - be rethought as a common good, from the point of view of accessibility and distribution as a resource, energy communities can be questioned as commons, in other words spaces for experimentation of politics in practice: energy would then be the support of bottom-up governance, through which the community establishes itself and sets up rules for sharing. Consisting of three elements - a resource, a community and a practice of commoning - the commons emerge as spaces of bottom-up politics. According to our hypothesis, energy communities would not only be spaces for sharing renewable resources, but also places of emergence of an instituting praxis on a spatial basis, through collective governance embodied in inhabited spaces. Our ethnographic approach anchored in space combines the analysis of the narratives and representations of the members of two energy communities in participatory housing, with the observation of consumption and space occupation practices, as well as material and spatial devices. Through their capacity to reformulate collective action, energy communities become spaces for the construction of political legitimacy, i.e. circulation of knowledge, production of discourse and action on society.