Citizen Energy Cooperatives – Successfully Identifying and Managing Conflicts

Citizen Energy Cooperatives – Successfully Identifying and Managing Conflicts

The project “BENERKON – Citizen Energy Cooperatives – Identifying and Managing Conflicts” examines conflicts in citizen energy cooperatives (CECs). CECs are not only frequently subject to conflicting objectives due to their diverse membership, whose members engage in CECs for a wide range of motivations (economic, political, ecological, social). Recent political and legal changes, including to the EEG, have also led to the fact that existing business models—often the result of complex negotiation processes among the cooperative’s heterogeneous members—will no longer be viable in the future. Conflicts over goals and future strategies must therefore be addressed constructively within CECs in order not to jeopardize the existence of the organization as a whole.

The BENERKON project is funded by the Baden-Württemberg program “Environmental Livelihoods and Their Protection” (BWPLUS). The project sponsor is the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The project is carried out in cooperation with the Nürtingen-Geislingen University of Applied Science under the direction of Prof. Dr. Carsten Herbes.
BENERKON is also supported, among others, by the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative Association (bwgv) and the Baden-Württemberg Climate Protection and Energy Agency GmbH (KEA).

The goals of the project are:

• the identification of typical conflicts in CECs (topics, actors, goals, patterns of handling), particularly against the background of changes in the legal framework since 2011
• the assessment of the impact of these conflicts on CECs, and
• the development of instruments for successful conflict management in CECs.

The BENERKON guide:

• creates an understanding of typical conflicts in CECs
• shows typical conflict constellations and their occurrence over time, as well as the underlying causes
• provides guidance for the concrete implementation of preventive and curative conflict management
• expands the portfolio of conflict management measures for executive boards and supervisory boards (e.g. peer consultation, goal check questionnaire)
• provides inspiration on how in-house forms of conflict management can be categorized and what experiences other CECs have had with them

Contact person
Prof. Dr. Susanne Blazejewski
Chair of NOA – Sustainable Organization and Workplace Design