DIALOGUES’ nine citizen action labs (Norway, Greece, Switzerland, Turkey, Canada, Bulgaria, Germany, and Italy) will explore paths towards the emergence and deepening of energy citizenship, in a co-creation process between the implementation partners and the participants. Citizenship has to do with belonging, and so does energy citizenship. It rests on the feeling of being part of something.

To this day, participating in the energy transition may not have created a feeling of belonging for a vast majority of people living in these countries. How to engage people in this process is our central aim. Engaging in the energy transition has focused more on individual sustainable consumption and investments in the production of renewable energies. How to engage diverse people collectively remains an open question.

Citizen Action Labs will create spaces for people that were, until now, distant from the energy transformation, marginally or not at all involved, to become aware of and experiment with their understanding of energy in their lives. How do they perceive and fulfill their needs for heating and cooling their homes, how and for what do they use electric energy, and how do they relate energy issues to the community around them, the local government, or the utilities? And vice versa; some Citizen Action Labs will work with the staff of local governments and other institutions to find out how they can favour energy citizenship, starting from their own understanding of their role in the energy transformation as individuals and as public servants.

In a wide variety of settings, the Citizen Action Labs will explore energy citizenship in the life of the participants, including under-privileged people, who might struggle with their electricity or gas bills, but also citizens from the upper classes and their high consumption lifestyles, young people and their ideas of a sustainable living, or even inhabitants of Greek islands, who will be asked to visualise a desirable future with renewable energy. Common to all labs is their citizen-centred character, with room for co-creation and giving attention to everybody, providing a voice in an environment that feels safe, welcoming and encouraging to all genders, to those at ease with speaking their mind and others not used to making themselves heard.

By listening to the voice and opinions of a vast majority of European citizens that have largely ignored the energy transition or have been ignored by it, the Citizen Action Labs expect to produce results that complement, integrate, and possibly also correct the existing, fairly scarce knowledge we have from studies and surveys on how citizens relate to energy and might have a hard time to come up with a coherent conceptual way of framing the issue.

DIALOGUES teams have been preparing their nine Citizen Action Labs, together with the respective, mostly community-based, implementation partners. Their unfolding in the second half of 2022 should provide the first evidence on the promise to produce original insights on the pathways towards the emergence and deepening of energy citizenship in Europe.

Authors: Karl-Ludwig Schibel (Climate Alliance Italy), and Marlyne Sahakian (University of Geneva)