Dynamics of community participation in the energy transition

Extended abstract 5-189-26

Community organisations have the potential to accelerate the energy transition by developing grassroots support where a top-down approach might be met with opposition. In particular, they can build capacity within communities and foster peer-to-peer collaboration in a shared environment. The need for community-led climate action has become clear in recent years, with a growing focus on hearing from and working with local communities; honing in on local people and places; and encouraging and supporting climate actions that these communities design and develop themselves.

Communities are an important source of passion, skills and knowledge, and volunteering is widely understood to have benefits to both the person volunteering and broader society. However, motivating and sustaining voluntary participation in these community-based organisations is a challenge.

To investigate the barriers and enablers of participation, we conducted thematic analysis of 24 in-depth interviews with Sustainable Energy Community (SEC) volunteers. Our findings relate to processes of volunteer motivation, recruitment, and level of activity of individual members and the group. Themes included the motivations of volunteers, the internal organisational structure of groups, their strategic processes, and the external challenges to community activism posed by private industry and bureaucratic systems.

This research details some of the dynamics of community volunteer groups and presents recommendations for programme design and delivery to improve volunteer experience, group organisational structure, strategic processes, and increase participation and retention of volunteers. While we focus on SECs to explore the dynamics of participation, the findings may be applicable more widely to community climate action in Ireland and elsewhere.

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