The third ENABLE.EU workshop on the energy transition – the Responsible Energy Practice Workshop – will be held on 15 March 2019 at the EESC in Brussels. In anticipation of this workshop, Carlo Sessa of ISINNOVA recently presented the ENABLE.EU project to the Permanent Study Group on Energy of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), highlighting its use of participatory foresight and explaining how this can help us better understand and thus encourage citizen participation in sustainable energy practices.
The workshop is the third of a sequence of workshops the project has organised to discuss the future of the energy transition to a low-carbon economy in Europe with energy policy experts, civil society representatives and citizens. A group of pioneer citizens – early adopters interviewed and selected in the 11 country case studies on energy prosumption, energy efficiency at home, heating and cooling and mobility – has been engaged in the process. In the second workshop, they helped to identify promising “responsible energy practices” from their own everyday life experiences, where responsible means responding to the need of reducing waste and energy consumption for the benefit of the households themselves, of their neighbourhoods and of the planet as a whole.
This workshop will bring these citizens and civil society representatives together to build a roadmap for realising an Energy Union Sustainable Citizens‘ Practice Scenario. Participants will identify promising everyday practices for sustainable energy conservation, production or consumption, and possible ways to translate them across Europe. Combining the top-down approach of the initial visioning phase with the bottom-up approach of the practice phase, this final roadmapping phase will lead to the identification of policy, commercial, and educational measures, creating a coherent strategy to promote the transition to low carbon energy.