Clean heat planning and delivery: what might effective governance entail?

Conference item

Across Europe, planning and delivery of clean heat, through measures such as heat networks, heat pumps, and coordinated retrofit programmes, has remained slow and uneven, suggesting heat decarbonisation is as much a question of developing effective governance arrangements as it is about technologies and market incentives. In this paper we examine what effective governance for clean heat might entail and apply a seven-domain analytical framework to the case of clean heat planning and delivery in Oxfordshire, Great Britain. We explore how Regional Energy Strategic Planning, as a new planning framework, is reconfiguring actors and relationships, authority, knowledge, and resources around clean heat planning and delivery. We find RESP is easing some governance challenges by institutionalising regional scale planning, strengthening horizontal relationships and standardising data flows. However, emerging structures and relationships appear fragile, uncertainties exist over stakeholder roles and responsibilities whilst local area energy planning, which sits outside formal RESP processes, is found to be the primary driver of local clean heat pathways. The case, thus, confirms the importance of and the practical challenges involved in creating effective governance, demonstrates the key analytical difference between governance as organising and governance for delivery, and how effective governance for net zero must negotiate seven challenges.

Authors: Barnes, J; Kerr, S; Mellard, C

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-29
• Event title: European Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy Summer Study
• Event location: Center Parcs, Lac d'Ailette, France
• Event website: https://www.eceee.org/summerstudy/
• Event start date: 2026-06-01
• Event end date: 2026-06-06
• Language: English
• Keywords: clean heat; governance; regional energy planning