Citizens' Motives towards Becoming Members of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs): The Role of Biospheric Values, Environmental Communication, and Sense of Community

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) represent complex phenomena involving tech-nical, environmental, and social issues. Consistently, they need to be framed as socio-technical innovations, and citizens’ involvement in them as rooted in several psychoso-cial dimensions. Therefore, the present study unravels citizens’ intention to become members of a REC from a psychosocial standpoint, taking into account the role of their Sense of Community (SoC), biospheric values, and environmental communication, as well as of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations towards RECs. An online questionnaire was administered to 900 Italian citizens (51.4% female; aged between 18 and 84) not being involved in RECs currently. A multiple mediation model was tested using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results show that environmental communication, bio-spheric values, and SoC all showed positive effects on both intrinsic and extrinsic moti-vation, even though only the latter showed a – positive – association with the intention to become member of a REC. Consistently, only the indirect effects through extrinsic motivations were significant. Overall, this suggests the complex-ities underlying RECs formation and maintenance, which require further attention. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.