Energy Management Approaches for Sustainable Communities
A key objective of work package 5 of the ENTRUST project has been to develop a cohesive community research environment utilising participatory action research (PAR) techniques that encourage active participant engagement in the project and the issues informing ENTRUST's intersectional, co-design programme. Establishing the creative spaces whereby stakeholders are able to identify, consider, and then deliberate on, the actions and behaviours that influence their respective participations and positionalities in the energy system and its current transition, has been essential to this approach. In addition, it was important for the research team that this was done by implementing a range of iterative, multi-scalar dialogues with participants within each of the case study communities that, in turn, also informed the team's engagements in each of the other communities when applicable. The previous two deliverables for this work package reported on how the ENTRUST team went about achieving these goals, from the selection of the communities of practice through to the reflexive feedback and analysis of the community dialogue outcomes. An important part of these activities was to ensure that an essential requirement of the project, achieving gender inclusion in the research actions, was possible. Collecting a majority male (or indeed female) perspective was considered anathema to the project's overall goals and therefore not considered an option. D5.1 Report on Community Dialogues demonstrated how the research team went about ensuring that balanced engagement did occur, in terms of gender, and discussed the suite of collaborative methods that were deployed. D5.2 Report on the Expert Feedback on Community Dialogue Outcomes dealt more specifically with an innovative research method adopted for the research communities in this project, a deliberative democracy tool known as the citizen jury, in addition to a modified Delphi-panel with experts – this was further augmented with engagements at the community level – to coproduce ...