ABSTRACT
Renewable energy initiatives at the community level are experiencing considerable growth. Significant technological innovations, particularly over the past two decades, have not only unleashed a promising renewables boom worldwide, but have also enabled expanded decentralised capacity at the local level. Many local communities have embraced these opportunities. To this end, there is notable entrepreneurial activity among contemporary community renewable actors today, activity often directed towards devising innovative community-based social enterprise and service models to help achieve the goal of sustainable energy production and use. This chapter uses two case studies of community renewable energy initiatives in the Northern Rivers region in Australia, focusing on the norms, processes, and relationships that drove these projects. It finds that the success of these initiatives often relies on collaborative governance arrangements between local citizens, local businesses, and local government institutions. These arrangements are in turn reinforced by some important place-based factors that the chapter identifies and discusses.
