Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy

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Alyson Chandler
5 years ago
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1 Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy Adrian Smith SPRU, University of Sussex ESMW Research Cluster Meeting The importance of individuals and communities to Britain s energy security 27th September ECI, Oxford Adrian Smith SPRU Science & Technology Policy Research University of Sussex

2 Background: grassroots innovations in sustainable development

3 Grassroots innovation practitioner claims and insights some local communities provide settings that allow grassroots experimentation, and that can sometimes replicate elsewhere, scale-up or translate into mainstream forms innovations often comprise novel organisational forms, resourcing models, and underpinning values, that facilitate the use of greener technologies some communities champion fringe causes and approaches, which provides a diverse reservoir of ideas when similar issues become publicly salient collective action at the local scale can help overcome problemsassociated with greening individual consumption choices (free rider, prisoner s dilemma, insufficient agency over choice sets) grassroots innovators struggle to survive -serial grant-funding; shifting funder priorities; volunteer burnout and turnover - which undermines any ability to be strategic many initiatives are technology takers poor feed-back into developing more appropriate hardware local roots and radical routes can make scaling-up and translation into mainstream difficult difficulties and frustration is not uncommon, and so learning from failure needs to be built in, as much as learning from successes: something difficult, since risk averse funders and policy-makers prefer not to dwell and highlight beacons instead significant change often arises through responses to social andeconomic forces way beyond the immediate local community networks of similar innovators might help secure a broader niche identity and interest, and thereby lobby for higher-level changes, e.g. policy institutions, utility strategies, infrastructure planning; but this social movement / political role requires effective intermediaries working between local initiatives

4 Community innovation in sustainable energy

5 The CISE project Research objectives: evidence for (or against) community energy niche building evidence of community energy influence on energy institutions exploring niche potential under different energy scenarios Research questions: how do community energy projects diffuse? to what extent is there networking between projects? how are expectations about community energy developing across projects? what social learning processes are in place? is a community energy niche emerging, and with what identity, influence and performance? what roles might community energy play in future energy systems? Research activities: survey of community energy projects social network analysis between projects in-depth case studies of exemplars and failures interviews with policy-makers, advocates and intermediaries development of future scenarios using Foresight energy narratives workshops, policy briefs, papers, advisory roles Challenges: handling the diversity and dynamism of projects scope, boundaries and representativeness managing mutual expectations and relationships with multiple practitioners working in an unstable policy and economic context

6 Future research agendas 1. Re-assessing recent experience in new light of public spending cuts, decentralisation of powers, and economic developments 2. Ambidextrous institutions: appetite / capabilities to handle soft and hard energy security paths simultaneously; synergies and tensions in terms of plurality of markets, public support, infrastructure management 3. Developing support infrastructures and institutions for grassroots innovation (cf. innovation programmes for clubs, hubs, centres, secondments, mentoring, research, best practice, etc that already exist for technology-based innovation in firms) a.g.smith@sussex.ac.uk

Enacting Transformative Innovation Policy: A Comparative Study

Enacting Transformative Innovation Policy: A Comparative Study Johan Schot - Director Science Policy Research Unit - SPRU University of Sussex @Johan_Schot Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium Aim