Beyond top-down and bottom-up: Hybrid governance in renewable energy communities in Italy

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are organisational configurations in which civic, public and market actors coordinate the production and shared use of renewable energy. While earlier scholarship interpreted these initiatives through a top-down/bottom-up dichotomy, more recent research has highlighted the growing relevance of hybrid governance arrangements that combine these organisational principles. However, limited attention has been devoted to the structural conditions that enable such hybrid governance arrangements to stabilise and operate in contexts characterised by regulatory volatility, administrative complexity and infrastructural constraints. This article introduces the concept of scaffolded hybrid governance, interpreting hybridity as a layered configuration sustained by institutional, organisational and infrastructural forms of scaffolding. Institutional scaffolding provides legitimacy and access to resources; organisational scaffolding redistributes competences and mediates between participation and professionalisation; infrastructural scaffolding renders energy sharing practices calculable and governable. Within these processes, intermediaries play a central role in coordinating actors and linking community initiatives with broader institutional, technological and financial systems. Drawing on a qualitative comparative case study of three Tuscan Renewable Energy Communities characterised by diverse actor configurations within a shared national framework, the article shows how different combinations of scaffolding shape the consolidation of hybrid governance in non-metropolitan contexts. In doing so, it shifts attention from organisational typologies to enabling architectures. The findings reveal how hybrid governance simultaneously enables collective action while generating new dependencies and asymmetries. More broadly, the article offers analytical tools to investigate the structural foundations of energy transitions and their implications for energy justice.