*3.3. Progression Factors*

Based on the EC reviews progression factors are grouped into seven new categories: "interactions with regulation and governance", "information and knowledge", "economic influencers", "technological infrastructure", "requirements for justice", "actor-bound drivers and criteria" and "network drivers and criteria" groups. This section begins with the description of progression factors by group, followed by their analysis via the metadata designated in Section 3.3. See Appendix A for all progression factors.

## 3.3.1. Interactions with Governance and Regulation

Most reviews discussed relationships with public authorities either as regulatory conditions and challenges or the difficulty of securing long-term, reliable political support (Table 2). At the heart of this is the requirement for the normative alignment of energy communities, meaning their format must be recognizable in terms of legal definitions [43]. In countries, where legislation does not yet recognize energy communities, tend to categorize them as a cooperative or a company. Such labels lead to unfair comparisons, as the same regulatory standards could apply to an EC as to a conventional energy provider [87,90]. Normative alignment is shown to erect insurmountable entry barriers to community initiatives that fail to navigate through convoluted legal requirements [2]. Moreover, even municipalities that initiate energy communities, face challenges when ensuring compliance to national strategies and laws [44]. This is due to change in the EU for RECs, as nation states committed to their normative alignment [103]. While this challenge is most prevalent during initiation phase, regulatory barriers influence the whole lifecycle, for example by cutting off community microgrids from energy markets, due to unsatisfactory interoperability standards [50]. Changing regulations would require political commitment, but for many countries, community energy is simply not on the agenda [35] or is subjected to inconsistent policies [2].


**Table 2.** Progression factors tied to interactions with governance and regulation.
