Academic stations
Dr Jörn Schaube was a doctoral student at the University of Trier. He studied social sciences and geography at the University of Münster and completed his studies in 2004 with the first state examination for secondary school teachers. Between 2005 and 2016, Jörn Schaube worked in the photovoltaic industry, where he held various positions in sales and business development. Between 2017 and August 2020, he was a doctoral fellow in the "Energy - Society - Change" think lab of innogy Stiftung and the Stiftung der deutschen Wirtschaft (SDW). Within this framework, he also developed the project "Building Bridges with the Sun", which aims to establish training programmes in the field of solar energy in various countries in Africa.
PhD project
In his dissertation, Jörn Schaube analysed the policy change in the Renewable Energy Sources Act in the course of the amendments to the Act in 2011/2012, 2014 and 2016. The Renewable Energy Sources Act represents a central policy for the transformation process of the energy transition. While the Act was originally designed to bring renewable energy technologies to market maturity and to trigger a dynamic of falling technology costs, in view of the fact that renewable energies now account for more than 40% of Germany's gross electricity generation, it now has the task of steering the further transformation of the electricity supply in the direction of renewable energies in a planned manner and embedding it in the overall energy industry context. The objectives and instruments of the EEG have changed, in some cases fundamentally, particularly as a result of the amendments of 2014 and 2016.In his work, Jörn Schaube analyses how far-reaching the dynamic change in policy objectives and instruments in the EEG since 2011 has been and which variables can be used to explain it.
In his search for explanatory variables, Jörn Schaube pays particular attention in his dissertation to the actor structure in the EEG policy subsystem. The theoretical foundation of the study is thus formed by the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the power resource theory, two concepts that start at the level of the actors with regard to the explanation of policy change, but adopt different, complementary perspectives. While the ACF focuses on the values, attitudes and ideas of actors, the power resource theory examines their interests and power resources. Due to their different approaches to the object of study, ACF and power resource theory can be combined to form a complementary analytical approach.