ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that developments in the European environment around the turn of the millennium were involved in creating a split between technology-specific Germany and France on the one hand, and technology-neutral Sweden and Norway on the other. Developments in the organizational field at the country level can explain why Poland and the UK came to join Germany and France, while Norway became increasingly technology-neutral. The political field proved especially important for developments in Germany and Sweden. It was the political field that ensured that Sweden retained its support mix basically unchanged, whereas Norway came to scrap its support to large-scale renewables due to developments in the organizational field. Overall, the European environment has been more important for the development of domestic policy when it is in the EU governing mode, implying that the EU is holding superior authority and that one specific support-scheme mix has gained superiority, but the European Environment has also been influential under other conditions. Organizational fields dominate more when segmented, implying that they are characterized by centralization of structural resources and one dominant institutional logic, but they have never been totally dominant. Political fields tend to dominate the development of domestic renewable-energy policies more in situations characterized by distributed structural resources and when renewables support enjoys high political salience.
