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Paper short abstract

We analyze how the interplay between energy systems researchers and the Swedish Energy Agency shapes the notion of “energy-relevant” social science research in Sweden. This notion is used to secure legitimacy and funding but also to police the boundaries of Swedish energy systems research.

Paper long abstract

Our research focuses on how funding agencies and notions of societal relevance can influence the development of scientific fields. Recently, scholars have paid renewed attention to how ideas about societal relevance can reconfigure the relationship between science and policymaking. Rather than viewing societal relevance as a property that research either has or lacks, emphasis has been placed on how actors engage in different practices to make scientific research relevant. Relevance is thus something that is done or enacted.

Reconfiguring an emerging field to focus on enacting societal relevance can be one way to gain legitimacy as well as access to funding. This process depends on interactions between researchers and actors in a variety of institutional settings. In this presentation, we focus on how the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA), a publicly funded sectoral agency and research funder, together with researchers in the transdisciplinary field of energy systems research shape the notion of “energy-relevant” social science. By interviewing prominent scholars in Sweden, research managers at SEA, and directly observing peer review panels, we explore the rhetorical repertoires drawn upon to assert or dismiss claims to societal relevance. These dynamics influence which research projects are ultimately carried out and thus shape the subsequent direction of the field’s development. We argue that these processes are best understood through a framework that combines insights from co-production with ideas about different institutional logics.