Leon Wansleben

Leon Wansleben is a permanent group leader (tenured) of the research group "Contested Ecologies" at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. He is an economic and political sociologist who studies transformations in economic governance interacting with changing structures of capitalism. Following his earlier work on finance, Wansleben's new research focuses on energy governance in contexts that have undergone liberalisation and growing penetration by renewable energy sources.

The project

Title: Institutions for the Advanced Energy Transitions

"With the rapid growth of renewable energy sources (RES), there is great hope that the generation of electricity with wind and solar can form the basis for comprehensive decarbonisation. However, it is precisely in those countries with high and rapidly growing RES shares that we are seeing increasing system costs, dysfunctions, and uncertainties. Key energy sector institutions in these countries — liberalised markets and renewables support policies — are often unable to prevent growing mismatches between the requirements of RES and the designs of existing systems. This leads to grid bottlenecks, investment uncertainties, and unresolved distributional conflicts. In this comparative project, I examine the extent to which countries can mobilise extant governance institutions or build new ones to solve these problems with the help of coordinated planning, market redesign, and the establishment of new financing and cost-distribution mechanisms. The project also aims to explore how opportunities and constraints for building the necessary institutions reflect infrastructural path dependencies, the distribution of energy-related interest groups, and broader institutional orders. The project particularly compares the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark due to the countries' high RES shares and their different institutional setups."

Hosting Institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• 2026 ‚Institutional conditions for systems planning in advanced energy transitions‘ In: D. Bauknecht (ed), Energy transitions: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Edward Elgar (with Max Willems & Philipp Golka)
• 2025 ‘Fiscal relations in multilevel climate governance: How conditional project grants shape local climate action’, Environment & Planning C Politics and Space (with Rebecca Elliott & Ned Crowley)
• 2025 ‘Ungleichheiten in der grünen Transformation: Die prädistributive Macht von Infrastrukturen’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, (mit Carlotta Terhorst)  
• 2023 The Rise of Central Banks. State Power in Financial Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press