Merle-Marie Johannsen

Activities

• Research on societal acceptance of renewable energy technologies and associated infrastructure
• Quantitative analysis of regional acceptance differences in Germany
• Qualitative analyses using focus groups, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and discourse analysis
• Development of a context-sensitive governance tool for early citizen participation
• Derivation of acceptance-oriented policy recommendations for the energy transition
• Focus on socially just and conflict-preventive design of infrastructure projects

Personal Information

Merle has been a member Graduate School of the Reiner Lemoine Foundation since January 2026. In her doctoral research, she examines questions of societal acceptance of renewable energy technologies and their associated infrastructures. The project aims to quantitatively assess and compare regional acceptance differences across Germany. Building on these insights, she is developing a context-sensitive governance instrument that enables the early and needs-oriented involvement of citizens in energy-transition infrastructure planning. Through this work, she seeks to contribute to a more socially just, contextually grounded, and durable design of transformational processes.

Merle completed her Master’s thesis in the field of social movement research, focusing on citizen initiatives related to renewable energy technologies. In this work, she analysed a case in Brandenburg in which a renewable energy infrastructure project failed due to civil-society protest, examining the discursive, organisational, and political dynamics that led to this outcome.

During her Master’s studies, Merle worked as a teaching and research assistant in the Environmental Governance Unit at Technische Universität Berlin. She also contributed to the project “Democratic Environmental Protection and Counterstrategies Against Right-Wing Extremism,” funded by the Heidehof Foundation, where she researched political influence, democratic environmental communication, and actor constellations within the environmental sector.

Merle is currently a research associate in the Department of Environmental Sciences at FernUniversität in Hagen. There, she examines the sociotechnical imaginaries of industrial carbon management technologies (ICMTs) in the European context. Her research combines actor and discourse analyses to identify both dominant and contested political, economic, societal, and institutional future visions. In addition, the analysis seeks to illuminate the power and participation structures shaping the discourse and to assess how these influence the development, governance, and potential path dependencies of these technologies.