This year's Lower Saxony Energy Days took place in Hanover on 20 and 21 November 2013. Under the motto "The energy transition is taking place locally - it depends on the municipalities!", stakeholders from society, politics, administration, business and science came together to discuss the role of municipalities in the energy transition in Germany. Our working group was also represented by Tamara Schnell.

"Over the two days, I was able to exchange ideas with experts from a wide range of fields and talk in depth about the challenges facing local authorities with regard to the energy transition." Tamara Schnell

Right at the beginning of the event, it was clearly emphasised that the "quota of complaints for this year has already been used up" and that the conference should therefore be a platform for constructive solutions. Under this motto, the participants also came together in the four specialist forums to discuss solutions based on four contributions each. Tamara Schnell made a contribution in expert forum 4: "Opportunities of energy transformation for rural areas - between value creation, innovation and participation".

In her presentation on "The social" in wind power projects, she used examples from the case studies of the WindGISKI research project to explain the extent to which social dynamics can be analysed from a sociological perspective on the basis of legitimisation processes. This allows municipalities to be understood as part of a multi-level system, which is characterised by institutional orders that are also transformed in transitions. As the topic of "acceptance" was repeatedly identified as a key problem at the conference, Tamara was able to address this issue in her presentation and present an alternative way of looking at social dynamics - true to the motto "less complaining, more constructive solutions".

At the end of the conference, the results from the four expert forums were summarised in a fishbowl discussion and discussed with Christian Meyer, Lower Saxony's Minister for the Environment, Energy and Climate Protection, and the moderators of the expert forums.