Abstract Transforming energy systems is a whole-of-society challenge. To mobilize the resources and political will to meet their Paris Climate Agreement obligations, the governments of Europe increasingly recognize the need for participation by their populations. Local governments are particularly involved in this shift from a centralized and top-down model towards a decentralized and co-created one. Diverse forms of engagement in multiple transitions, such as energy communities, participatory planning groups, shared mobility initiatives, and new approaches to self-consumption are emerging throughout Europe. This review studies co-creation of sustainable energy transitions between local public actors and their populations through the lens of opportunity spaces composed of structural factors and acted on by agency. Taking a pragmatic approach, we search the literature for key factors, assisted in screening by an open-source AI tool. We synthesize these pieces of actionable information into a set of 7 issues of interest for anyone engaged in participatory planning or energy initiatives, with lessons for policymakers and practitioners. These issues are: legitimacy; diversity and representativeness; social networks/social capital; local knowledge; territorial values, discourses, and identity; and the physical resources of the territory and how to access them. We rank these issues in terms of their relative malleability to change agency and discuss what it means to navigate the evolving opportunity space. By focusing on cross-border and cross-type analysis, we hope to deliver broadly applicable insights that can serve as a starting point for further study and implementation.
Marcroft et al. (2026) studied this question.