Do people feel that citizen energy assemblies can play a meaningful role in the energy transition?

Our colleagues associate professor Goda Perlaviciute and junior researcher Wytse Gorter have just completed a new report about the Dutch Citizens Energy Assembly on how non-participants assessed the assembly’s discussion process and output.

What is the Dutch Citizens Energy Assembly? The Inwonerraad Energie, IRE (in Dutch) was a series of discussions in early 2023 among 75 Dutch citizens about the future energy landscape of the Netherlands.

The following takeaways were made by comparing surveys by the IRE participants both prior to and following the discussions with a large survey of 1,000 people from the general population to get their thoughts as “outsiders” on the general concept of citizen assemblies.

Main takeaways:

  1. Getting citizens involved in decision-making on energy: participants want to be involved in decision-making, and want others to be involved, too
  2. General acceptance of the citizen assembly: IRE participants and the general population have positive views about participatory processes like citizen assemblies
  3. Citizen assembly’s goals: a democratic process, but doubts about new knowledge and accelerating the progress to the energy
  4. Recommendations: the general public found the assembly’s recommendations acceptable, if not always feasible, and ranked access to easy-to-understand information about energy decisions as the most importantrecommendation.
  5. Role of the recommendations: not just informing, preferably advising, but not necessarily decisive (informing role: policy makers are free to choose whether or not to incorporate the recommendations; advising role: policy makers can choose to deviate from the recommendations if there is a valid reason; decisive: policy makers cannot deviate from the recommendations
  6. The four D’s: dialogue, diversity, deliberation, and decision-making power
    (dialogue: two way conversation where citizen’s views are listened to; diversity: participants are a good reflection of the general population with a range of views; deliberation: taking different arguments into account and considering them seriously; decision-making power: the input from the participatory process is taken seriously and has impact on real decision making). The survey found that the general population gave a more neutral score to the “4 D’s” than the participants in the IRE, but they were still generally more positive than negative about the achievability of these four aspects.
  7. Involving underrepresented groups: putting more effort into selecting a representative group is important, but giving underrepresented views more weight in the actual discussions is less acceptable.

Here’s a bit of background on how it all got started:

In 2022, the minster of climate and energy, Rob Jetten, founded the Energy System Expert Team 2050 (ESET), a group of researchers with expertise in energy, economics, business, behavioral and social sciences. EP Groningen’s professor Linda Steg is one of the ten members of the expert team.

Minister Jetten tasked the ESET to share their recommendations for the future Dutch energy system. The expert team felt it was important to include insights from Dutch citizens in this process, so they set up the Citizens Energy Assembly (Inwonerraad Energie, IRE), which consisted of four day-long discussions in January and February 2023.

The main goal of the IRE was to discuss which general conditions needed to be met, and to figure out what matters most to Dutch citizens, in the development and realization of a new energy system (post-transition from fossil fuels).

The IRE participant group’s composition was deliberately chosen to be representative of the Dutch population in terms of where they live, their political orientation, their socio-economic status and their gender (among others).

Of the 25 recommendations which the IRE came up with, 19 receive a majority vote from the group (but all suggestions were included in the report of the Citizen Assembly). The ETES presented the IRE report to minister Jetten in April, 2023.

These are the IRE’s recommendations for what conditions should be considered and prioritized as the Dutch energy transition moves forward:

  1. Collective energy purchasing by the European Union
  2. Solidarity in the energy transition
  3. Ensure that experts inform the public about the ecological impact of energy sources
  4. Dialogue
  5. Understandable information
  6. Making energy affordable for everyone
  7. The Netherlands should have an optimal green energy system
  8. Creating a good living environment for everyone
  9. Independent energy advisory bodies
  10. Hydrogen storage for over-capacity
  11. Future-proof infrastructure
  12. Ecological living environment
  13. Preserving picturesque views
  14. More of a mix, less dependence on (foreign) energy sources
  15. Raising awareness among citizens about energy use
  16. Shared responsibility
  17. Positive sustainability
  18. The most sustainable option for transport should be the cheapest and easiest
  19. Gains from a sustainable society

You can view the full report in Dutch here as a PDF.

Photo credit: ETES2050/Olivier Middendorp