Repairable Transitions: Institutional Maintenance, Dispute Recurrence, and the Social Durability of Renewable Energy Deployment

• Saad Mahmood

  Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Lakki Marwat, Bannu Road, Lakki Marwat 28420, Pakistan

  Author

• Tariq Hussain

  Department of Economics and Management Sciences, Khushal Khan Khattak University, Karak–Bannu Road, Karak 27200, Pakistan

  Author

Renewable energy transitions are widely described through targets, project pipelines, and technological substitution, but the lived experience of deployment is frequently shaped by recurring disputes, partial settlements, and periodic breakdowns in trust. In many settings, the decisive constraint is not whether a given project can be approved, but whether institutions can keep projects governable over long lifecycles as conditions, knowledge, and political expectations change. This paper advances a social science theory of repairable transitions. It treats conflict and revision not as exceptional deviations from a planned pathway, but as normal features of deployment in pluralist societies under nonstationary ecological and infrastructural conditions. The paper’s contribution is a conceptual model of institutional maintenance in renewable deployment, emphasizing how governance systems repeatedly perform repair work when commitments, evidence, or authority arrangements fail to hold. Repair work is analyzed as a patterned set of practices that re-stabilize decision meanings, redistribute responsibility, and rebuild confidence without requiring full consensus. The argument distinguishes material repair (changes to project design and mitigation), procedural repair (changes to decision and review routines), and interpretive repair (changes to the frames and standards through which impacts and benefits are evaluated). The analysis shows how delegation to intermediaries, the politics of urgency, and uneven capacities to influence regulators can intensify repair demands and make repair more contentious. The paper concludes with institutional design implications that prioritize transparency calibrated to contestability, standing for post-approval review, and portfolio-level learning arrangements that reduce repeated crisis cycles while preserving democratic disagreement.

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