I’m thrilled to be part of a new paper, with my colleagues Jason Chilvers and Tom Hargreaves, which is just out in Energy Research and Social Science. The paper is entitled ‘Ecologies of participation in socio-technical change: The case of energy system transitions’ and is the first academic paper to come out of our UKERC-funded project ‘Remaking Energy Participation‘. It reports on the results of the systematic mapping of energy participation in the UK 2010-2015 which I carried out. In particular it highlights the broader patterns or ‘ecologies’ of participation which we found by doing this mapping, and draws conclusions about the big picture of energy participation in emerging UK energy transitions. We argue that this shows that certain forms of participation – particularly opinion surveys and behaviour change – are valued over others – for example, protests or arts projects. There are also many unacknowledged connections between different examples of participation, for example in the models of engagement used, the topics covered/ or excluded, or the participants involved. The paper demonstrates that by trying to take account of this broader ecology of participation we can produce better evidence for energy transitions, and might view and intervene in examples of energy participation quite differently.
A plain-English briefing paper reporting on the results of this mapping work is available here.
Helen Pallett 