BENE – Citizen action for sustainable energy

Assessing and enhancing the contribution of active citizen engagement to more energy aware lifestyles

The project ’BENE’ will assess the potential of active citizen engagement in energy issues (e.g. local and regional citizens’ initiatives promoting sustainable energy use, energy cooperatives) to contribute to the promotion of more energy-aware lifestyles. It will analyse necessary institutional frameworks and motivations for engagement. Building on this analytical basis, it will develop and implement strategies for expanding the scope of existing initiatives and for transferring good practice models to further communities. Furthermore a policy paper will summarise central results and provide recommendations on possible ways of creating supportive framework conditions for bottom-up initiatives as well as supporting their contribution to (self-)education and motivation towards energy aware lifestyles.

Within the project, SERI will analyse if and how the energy consumption of engaged citizens differs from the Austrian average. Moreover, we will initiate workshops and activating surveys in order to promote the extension and replication of existing initiatives. The project is coordinated by IFZ (Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture).

This work was funded under “Neue Energien 2020″ programme of the Austrian climate and energy funds.