This publication is intended to be used as a practical guide and toolkit for practitioners looking to engage not only vulnerable households in social energy projects, but other partners and stakeholders as well.
Authored by Manon Burbidge and Saska Petrova from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, this document sets out guidelines and a toolkit for practitioners looking to create an engagement strategy for energy projects involving vulnerable groups. We present the academic and grey literature perspectives on what engagement means, why engagement fails to occur, and barriers to the involvement of vulnerable groups in research. We then put forwards solutions and strategies, derived from academic and grey literature, as well as from research projects and organisations in the energy or social domain, with four key best practices:
• Building trusting relationships
• Building in equitable processes and procedures
• Ensuring diversity of membership
• Ensuring tangible benefits for participants.
The document also outlines barriers and solutions to engagement in the identified POWER UP project business models. Finally, we also put forwards several engagement models and interactive tools which can facilitate the design of an engagement strategy
This document is the project’s deliverable D3.1: Knowledge Transfer on Engagement with Vulnerable Households
You may be interested in watching the recorded webinar during which the report was launched. Apart from the theoretical focus on what engagement is and how it can work, it also shows very concretely how a city goes about it. The testimony came from an expert from the City of Eeklo in Belgium.
