Too uncertain to invest, too urgent to dismiss: investigating agrivoltaics in Italy

The energy transition we are currently experiencing involves a wide range of individual, community and societal psychological processes. Adopting a multi-level perspective, in this contribution we illustrate a line of qualitative-quantitative research that we have been developing in Italy since 2010. In particular, the theory of social representations in relation to multi-level perspectives, discursive approaches, and socio-ecological models of transitions has been adopted as an overarching framework. The studies were conducted on texts and visual data, through photovoice activities, in-depth interviews with experts and joint intergenerational interviews with inhabitants of the communities involved. Combining different qualitative and qualitative-quantitative analyses (e.g. thematic analysis, lexicometric analysis, discourse analysis) proved to be crucial in order to access meaning-making processes that manifest across societal, community and interpersonal levels. Overall, the results suggest that, local communities appropriate, resist, even radically transform, the discourses on transition set at the level of political decision makers and cultural elites, anchoring them to locally relevant universes of meaning. A qualitative approach proves indispensable for understanding and interpreting psycho-social processes in energy transition.