title: 21st Century energy and legitimation of new industries: Innovating for and legitimating the bioeconomy – A study of the European Green Transition
Creators: name: de Carvalho Rodrigues, Gonçalo Filipe
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2025

description: The literature around legitimation explores the creation and implementation of change at several levels. Associating legitimation to the green transition allows us to understand when it was created and where the implementation has occurred, or not, why, and who is responsible for it. Since legitimation is such an important topic in the academic world of business, the exploration of its association to such a current issue as the implementation of the green transition is a very relevant approach to understand it further. The connection between the green transition and legitimation is what is explored in this thesis, through the energy sector.

To do so, this research focused on identifying the historical presence of the green transition through an analysis of the most important documents and strategies affecting it. Associated to these documents are actors who create and implement them at several levels of society. Considering the transition affects all planes of society, including industry and institutions, the research tried to gather the insights from actors of said planes. Thus, regulators, innovators and integrators were defined and engaged with in order to understand how the green transition is being perceived by experts. Interviews were set up with representatives of the energy sector from higher international institutions and governments; successful, green oriented businesses; and activist or media related NGOs or institutions.

The insights from these experts showed the main factors associated with a potential delay in the green transition. Time and reaction are considered, in this thesis, as the two main factors contributing to the delay of the green transition’s energy sector. As such, the research focused on understanding the underlying events that cause such delays and whether the processes can be improved through the exposition of their framework.

Alongside the actors’ inputs, the theoretical lens of the institutional genealogy took a front seat in the observation and guidance of the train of thought in this research. Focusing on understanding the history of incumbents and their effect on allowing the current green transition to flourish, the institutional genealogical lens synergized with the profiles chosen and with the historical approach that set up the research. It gives a historical categorization, via policy proxies, of the events that marked the green transition and how the current events contrast with older ones.

Therefore, this research tries to look at the green transition’s energy sector through the eyes of the current actors’ insights while keeping in mind the incumbents that generated the current issues and which are still present in the transition. Without attributing any fault, this thesis attempts to show the current progress of the green transition’s energy sector and uncover potential factors that affect its speed. As a final contribution to knowledge, the thesis provides a tentative framework of the influential actors and their relationship with legitimation regarding the legitimation of the green transition through the energy sector.