ABSTRACT
Across the projects, stakeholders represented local publics that were affected by, or benefitted from, the DE installation as lacking in education, understanding, awareness and concern about energy and climate change, which is a not uncommon way of imagining energy users (Barnett, Burningham, Walker, & Cass, 2012). These deficit representations of publics co-shaped the nine case studies in varying ways, revealing differences across the four sectors. In particular, for the private sector projects, these representations were associated with an emphasis on technological solutions and a lack of active engagement with socio-behavioural aspects of DE, attributed to ‘normal’ lifestyles:
By contrast, for community and third sector-led projects, stakeholders described a strong desire to engage with local energy users in order to make them aware of the new DE system and reduce their energy use. Responsibility for using the technologies to save energy was not simply passed on to householders, but instead actively taken on board by stakeholders, who went out of their way to maximise project outcomes in order to achieve enduring behavioural change:
However, such efforts to effect behavioural changes often focused on the financial rather than the environmental benefits of DE technologies. This was justified by project stakeholders by representing local residents as unable to understand DE technologies and its context (e.g. climate change), and requiring an adjusted message:
In other words, only DE projects led by some sectors show signs of attempts to enable ‘energy citizenship’ (Devine-Wright, 2007) involving attempt to disrupt ‘normal’ disengagement from energy supply and use, indicating that this commonly cited benefit of DE cannot be presumed to be universally present across all DE initiatives across sectors.
