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Topic

Ownership and Beyond: Examining Approaches to Community Governance of Renewable Energy Infrastructure

Department of Geography

Date & location

• Tuesday, August 12, 2025

• 10:00 A.M.

• David Turpin Building

• Room B215

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Crystal Tremblay, Department of Geography, ßÉßɱ¬ÁÏ (Supervisor)

• Dr. Karena Shaw, School of Environmental Studies, UVic (Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Sarah Wiebe, School of Public Administration, ßÉßɱ¬ÁÏ 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Jane Butterfield, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UVic

   

Abstract

Energy transitions are essential if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, given that substituting renewable for fossil energy sources dramatically reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable energy also has the potential to improve energy security, especially when combined with local ownership. Local ownership in turn has the potential to offer more “just” outcomes, allowing communities impacted by energy production to exert control over the design of energy infrastructure and to benefit from it. Given the challenges many Canadian communities, especially remote and Indigenous communities, face with unreliable and expensive power generation scenarios, small-scale, decentralized, and community-owned renewable energy is rapidly emerging as a desirable pathway towards the energy transition.

Community energy projects face a range of challenges in their successful scale up and implementation. Because of this, the benefits and outcomes of “community energy” projects are also largely tied to the governance and decision-making which takes place within the projects themselves, the actors who are involved, and the resources available to communities, each of which can largely determine a project’s success and how both its benefits and risks are distributed. Despite the importance of these decision-making processes, there is currently limited research which has investigated what governance approaches are currently in use by communities to support their involvement in these locally developed energy projects. In addition to this, the outcomes these governance approaches can facilitate for prospective communities are often not well defined, understood, or appreciated. In response to this gap, this research set out to define and categorize the range of governance approaches which are currently facilitating community involvement in the development of renewable energy. Because of the context of this research, identifying how communities are applying those models to the Canadian energy landscape is a key goal.

The results from this study demonstrate that there is currently a significant range of governance approaches available to support community involvement in energy (including within Canada), leading to a wide variety of potential outcomes. These governance approaches facilitate community involvement in energy across a range of primary outcomes and at many different capacities. They are also shown to facilitate a broad range of control types and levels of financial investment. The findings emphasize the importance of a community’s context, its composition, and capacity and high light the importance of a range of actors in providing these projects with access to enabling policies, affordable funding, and capacity building opportunities. This study cannot specify definitively one approach to governance as providing the most “desirable outcomes”, the results indicate that to best support communities they will require access to a broad range of potential governance approaches that can respond their unique challenges, capacities, and goals. The means and level of involvement by the community should also be self-selected to reflect this and best support their desired outcomes.