This paper focuses on the knotty interdependencies between the physical market for renewable electricity (production and distribution) and the market for trading the renewable attributes of that electricity as virtual commodities. Public actors are key to constructing environmental markets (Callon, 2009) in enabling inter-organisational responses (Harrison et al., 2023) towards climate change. One such intervention is the EU regulatory framework for Guarantees of Origin (GOs) for renewable electricity, and the market that has evolved in response to it. GOs are one type of energy attribute certificate (EAC). The primary goal of the GO framework is to provide proof about the source of electricity to end users, thus enabling informed decisions. A second goal is to encourage further investments in renewable energy.

However, despite its rapid growth, the GO market has ‘failed’ in the information asymmetry and additionality goals (Mulder & Zomer, 2016). This is because although GOs technically enable tracking a certificate to specific production resources, in practice they have been viewed as environmental commodities, differentiated by price, not origin. In this paper, we view the GO market as a contested space, underpinned by various actors’ differing market visions.

Although prior studies underline the importance of market visions in initiating market shaping (Flaig & Ottosson, 2022; Storbacka et al., 2022), little is known about how alternate and possibly competing visions influence these efforts. In this paper, we contend that considering the multiplicity of market visions (Kjellberg et al., 2012) is crucial in understanding the development of markets designed for achieving sustainability goals. We link the market-shaping debate to the Interaction and Network Approach (INA) by outlining the interplays between competing market visions and the resource layer (Baraldi et al., 2023; Prenkert et al., 2022). We discuss: ‘how do competing market visions intend to (re)shape the interdependencies between the physical electricity market and the virtual GO certificate market?’.