Who builds the energy transition? Actors and networks in a German research initiative

The transformation to a nearly climate-neutral building sector requires the interaction of different actors at different levels. In Germany, the federal research initiative "Energiewendebauen" aims at enhancing the knowledge base in the building sector by bringing together actors from research and practice. Within the programme, funding of several million Euros is provided for research, development and demonstration for energy-efficient buildings and neighbourhood. The intention behind building such a knowledge network is to ensure that sustainable innovations are taken up broadly. This takes up the notion put forward by conceptual frameworks on the diffusion of innovation and on socio-technical transitions that argue that knowledge and actor networks are an important precondition to change. In this paper, we therefore examine the actor structure of the projects funded as part of the research initiative to evaluate in how far the programme succeeds in this regard. A data base of 314 projects including 572 different actors is analysed applying network analysis. The findings were validated and extended in a workshop with experts from the community under study. We categorise the actors participating in this programme based on a scheme from the technological innovation system (TIS). Within the network, the categorisation helped discover which types of actors often interact but also whether the network is open for a diversity of actors affected by the transition of the sector. As to be expected, actors in research and development play an important role, in particular technical universities and research institutions. They act as key agents of change as they connect many of the other actors through a variety of projects. As such they may be crucial to including other types of actors which are not yet well represented, e.g. municipalities and end-users.