The politics of land in Israel's solar transition: Top-down and bottom-up governance

The expansion of solar energy has brought land to the center of energy policy debates, yet the governance processes that determine how land is allocated, contested, and transformed remain insufficiently understood. This article examines how solar deployment reshapes land-use governance through the interaction between top-down state authority and bottom-up local claims across open landscapes, built environments, and productive agricultural lands. Israel provides a revealing setting, as land scarcity and a centralised land regime heighten the stakes of solar siting and make governance tensions visible. Drawing on a qualitative case study based on regulatory documents, governmental protocols, stakeholder materials, field visits, and 26 semi-structured interviews, the analysis shows that solar siting generates distinct temporal, spatial, and distributive effects. National authorities accelerate deployment and set spatial priorities that treat territories as readily available for development. Municipalities, communities, and landholders respond by mobilizing ecological knowledge, asserting community rights, and advancing alternative visions of land value. These encounters shape which landscapes host solar infrastructure, which land uses are displaced or preserved, and how transition benefits and burdens are distributed. Although grounded in Israel, these mechanisms extend more broadly. Across settings, solar expansion operates less as a uniform national strategy than as a negotiated reconfiguration of territorial authority, land politics, and spatial meaning. The findings demonstrate that the energy transition is also a land-use transition. For land-use policy, this underscores the need for governance arrangements that balance national goals with place-based priorities and enable renewable energy development to proceed in legitimate and spatially just ways.