Developing social energy policies in rural areas with multilevel governance – implementation insights in Mediterranean regions from the ENTRACK project

Peer-reviewed paper 3-173-26

Citizens in situations of financial vulnerability are the ones hit the hardest by energy prices’ surges. With most initiatives against energy poverty focusing on densely populated areas, rural areas usually tend to be under-addressed.

Focusing on rural Mediterranean localities in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the LIFE-funded ENTRACK project aims to support local authorities to co-design social energy policy responding to their citizens’ specific needs, with a focus on vulnerable groups.

Drawing on Butler et al.’s (2018) argument that energy demand governance must go beyond “conventional” energy policy to engage the social and institutional dimensions of energy use, ENTRACK positions itself as an empirical application of this governance rethinking in a rural Mediterranean context.

Four complementary methods were deployed: a taxonomy of social energy policies from EU to municipal level across the four countries, ethnographic research, policymaker self-evaluation, and policy co-design within Municipality-Region Partnerships (MRPs). The sequential logic of these methods is itself a methodological contribution.

Findings show a pronounced governance gap in social energy policy, with direct consequences for energy efficiency delivery. Ethnographic research confirms that barriers to efficiency adoption are as much social and informational as financial. Policymaker self-evaluation surfaced systematic discrepancies between policy intent and citizen experience. Co-design activities produced concrete, community-anchored policy orientations, which embed energy efficiency as a locally identified priority rather than a top-down mandate. The paper concludes that stronger territorialisation of social energy policy, supported by integrated multi-method participatory approaches, is a prerequisite for achieving a just energy transition in rural Mediterranean areas.