Digital participation as participatory infrastructure in local energy transitions: A review-informed framework

Digital participation is increasingly expected to improve legitimacy, learning, and conflict management in local energy transitions, yet many tools remain misaligned with the cognitive, procedural, and organizational conditions under which participation becomes meaningful. This article develops a review-informed framework for digital participation in local energy planning by combining a structured integrative review with a practice-informed reanalysis of material produced in a three-year German research project (2023–2026) on “Visualizing, Communicating, and Feeding Back in the Energy Transition.” The empirical corpus covers a multi-source qualitative dataset from sixteen workshop sessions with more than 800 participants, a structured post-session survey, and project documentation for a modular participation prototype. The review and reanalysis mutually reinforce five recurrent implementation gaps: recruitment without reach, visualization without credibility, feedback without consequence, tools without process fit, and innovation without organizational viability. The workshop material confirms that stakeholders value digital participation most when it combines spatial orientation, layered information, and governed feedback rather than visual spectacle alone. The prototype analysis further shows how these requirements can be translated into an infrastructure that links map-based exploration, explanatory content, low-threshold feedback, process timelines, and assistive AI. The article argues that digital participation should be understood less as a communication add-on and more as a relational participatory infrastructure: embedded in planning routines, dependent on maintenance and credibility, and shaped by who controls the platform. We draw implications for municipal procurement of digital participation tools, the design of hybrid online-offline planning processes, and future review work that takes infrastructural maintenance and platform governance seriously.