Sören Becker is a Research Associate in the Institutional Change and Regional Public Goods department within the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner near Berlin; and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg. His main research focus is the emergence of new forms of organization and collective forms of ownership in transitions to renewable energy. In his PhD research he analyses the attempts to remunicipalise the urban energy networks in Hamburg and Berlin. He wants to understand how these developments relate to given institutional ensembles and governance patterns, material infrastructures, and sociospatial structures. He has published on conflicts and ownership in the German energy transition, on alternative collective energy projects, and institutional and spatial factors in sustainability transitions. He has received his M.A. degree in Political Science, Human Geography and Economics from the University of Potsdam and has lectured at University of Freiburg and at the Berlin School for Economics and Law. In the autumn of 2015 he was took up a short-term visiting research fellowship at the Centre for Urban Resilience and Energy (CURE) at the University of Manchester. His guest post can be found here.
Addressing scientific and policy challenges at the interface of energy system transformations, the environment and cities
People and Energy Collective 