Analysing Swiss energy companies´ strategies embedded in their socio-political, economic and physical environment

After the nuclear accident in Fukushima, several countries decided to accelerate the sustainability transition of their energy system by extending the share of renewables actively but also quitting nuclear power. Regarding this political level of ambition, energy companies´ strategies play a decisive role in terms of the implementation, progress and success of the energy transition. These strategies decisively depend from and influence the political, economic, technical and ecological context, in which they are embedded. This contribution investigates the embeddedness of strategies in the swiss energy sector, in order to enhance the understanding of corporate strategy development. We employ the triple embeddedness framework (TEF) (Geels 2014), which considers the interaction of firms with their economic and socio-political environment. Additionally, we pay a special attention to the physical embeddedness (technical and ecological), which is not yet fully developed in the TEF, although the physical conditions form crucial context factors for energy companies, especially with higher shares of renewable energies. For empirical evidence, we analyse the strategies of selected energy companies in the Swiss energy sector through secondary data and document analysis – according to the TEF. This context and strategy analysis will be mirrored by expert interviews with the analysed energy entrepreneurs, to validate the revealed factors and relations as well as the perception of the importance of different context factors on firms´ strategy development. This study results in a deduction of different embedded companies´ strategies types in the Swiss energy sector and shows how socio-political, economic and physical conditions, e.g. the technical infrastructure or the availability of particular ecological resources, form important context factors. In so doing, this analysis contributes to a better understanding of energy companies’ strategy development and shows relevant parameters for the governance of the future energy transition, which can be played back to policymakers.