• Energy Research

Meeting international targets to limit climate change requires countries around the world to decarbonise whole energy systems. It is increasingly recognised that low-carbon energy transitions will need to focus as much on social transformations and the meaningful engagement of society as they do technical aspects. Most existing studies to engage society with energy system change focus on discrete forms of participation around specific technologies or particular parts of the energy system, with very few exploring distributed engagements with energy in terms of ‘whole system’ change. We set out to address this research gap in two important ways. First, we report on an innovative approach to opening up diverse issue framings and participant perspectives about energy futures in the UK, called distributed deliberative mapping (DDM), that examines how alternative formats and models of public participation shape appraisal outcomes. In this way, we experimentally broaden out beyond conventional deliberative formats of participation, in terms of ‘representative’ mini-publics and expert elicitation, to also engage with activist, grassroots innovator and consumer-based models of participation and their associated publics. Second, in doing so we develop an explicitly sociotechnical approach, emphasising the often-unacknowledged social arrangements that are co-produced with the technical elements of energy systems. Six diverse sociotechnical visions were developed and appraised: business as usual, large-scale technologies, deliberative energy society, smart tech society, local energy partnerships and off-grid energy communities. Across the five groups, we find a variety of problem framings that go far beyond the energy ‘trilemma’ and a greater diversity and range of technical and social criteria with which low-carbon energy futures are appraised. Our DDM study involving citizens and specialists shows that incumbent visions of centralised energy systems, such as business as usual and large-scale technologies, perform much lower than decentralised alternatives, such as a smart-tech society and local energy partnerships. Rather than a dominant focus on eliciting the views of ‘representative’ mini-publics to inform centralised decisions made by those managing ‘the transition’, DDM reveals and can support much more distributed modes of governing and democratising sustainable energy futures, across spaces and scales.

Public policy requires public support, which in turn implies a need to enable the public not just to understand policy but also to be engaged in its development. Where complex science and technology issues are involved in policy making, this takes time, so it is important to identify emerging issues of this type and prepare engagement plans. In our horizon scanning exercise, we used a modified Delphi technique. A wide group of people with interests in the science and policy interface (drawn from policy makers, policy adviser, practitioners, the private sector and academics) elicited a long list of emergent policy issues in which science and technology would feature strongly and which would also necessitate public engagement as policies are developed. This was then refined to a short list of top priorities for policy makers. Thirty issues were identified within broad areas of business and technology; energy and environment; government, politics and education; health, healthcare, population and aging; information, communication, infrastructure and transport; and public safety and national security.

This paper develops a novel approach to mapping diverse forms of participation and public engagement, using the example of the UK energy system. It builds on emerging systemic accounts of participation, which go beyond a focus on individual instances of participation, to gain an understanding of broader patterns and connections. Our approach, which forms part of an emerging family of methods that seek to map across multiple forms of public involvement in issues and systems, draws on systematic review methodology and a relational co-productionist conception of participation. The findings of a systematic mapping of public participation related to the UK energy system 2010–2015 are presented, comprising 258 cases in total. The mapping analysis reveals patterns as to the what (energy objects and issues), how (procedural formats) and who (publics) of energy participation in the UK, which go far beyond the conventionally assumed forms and sites of public participation around energy. Implications for how the dynamics of ‘whole system’ energy participation are represented and the role of approaches to mapping participation in governing energy transitions are considered.