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, completing his studies in 2004 with the first state examination for secondary school teachers. Between 2005 and 2016, Jörn Schaube worked in the photovoltaic industry, holding 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 solar energy training programmes in various African countries.
PhD Project
In his dissertation, Jörn Schaube analysed the policy change in the Renewable Energy Sources Act during the 2011/2012, 2014, and 2016 amendments. The Renewable Energy Sources Act serves as a central policy for the energy transition. While the Act was initially 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 2014 and 2016 amendments. In his work, Jörn Schaube examines the extent to which the dynamic shift in policy objectives and instruments in the EEG has been far-reaching since 2011 and identifies the variables that can 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 begin at the level of actors in explaining policy change, but adopt different, complementary perspectives. While the ACF focuses on actors' values, attitudes, and ideas, the power resource theory examines their interests and power resources. Because of their different approaches to the object of study, ACF and power resource theory can be combined to form a complementary analytical framework.