Stakeholder decision-making in energy policy and the communication of research results on the transformation of energy systems often do not coincide. The underlying processes, e.g. acceptance of the various interest groups, have been partially researched. Nevertheless, there is almost no consideration of these processes in models and analyses of the transformation of energy systems. With the establishment of an international cooperation, a proposal for an international research training group is to be developed in order to investigate the outlined research gap in three main topics.