Decentralisation offers one route to energy system decarbonisation, and local energy systems (LES) provide focal points for decentralisation. LES involve the integration of different generation, storage, and demand-side technologies across heat, power, and transport systems, within defined localities. Public support is necessary for LES deployment at pace and scale, but while past research has examined public attitudes towards individual technologies, few studies have investigated perceptions of systemic shifts towards LES. This paper presents findings from a nationally representative UK survey (n n = 3034) on LES. We compare two ways of exploring perceptions of decentralised energy: as a broad systemic shift, and as the cumulative deployment of multiple LES innovations. Results show high levels of public support for a systemic shift towards decentralisation, but more moderate levels of support for specific LES innovations. Regression analysis highlight the role of personal characteristics, climate concern, political beliefs, and engagement with technologies in influencing support for LES. Support is more predictable for decentralisation, whose meaning is clear in principle while containing ambiguities in practice. Support for LES innovations is less predictable and is explained by the diversity with which households interpret the multiple propositions afforded by LES innovations. For LES to benefit from majority public support for a systemic shift, policy and industry actors need to better understand the diverse set of perceptions and values that LES hold for the public and seek broader and deeper engagement with the public around specific LES innovations, as well as around systemic change more broadly.

Local Smart Grids are emerging during the climate crisis, as governments and industry recognize the need to better integrate intermittent renewable energy, storage, transportation, heating, and smart technologies. Such projects can represent profound changes to the status quo of energy and citizen lifestyles. They are also being associated with the "four Ds," whereby Local Smart Grids are decarbonizing, decentralizing, digitalizing, and potentially democratizing energy systems. Yet, due to their recent arrival, there is very little social scientific research that has aimed to better understand public views, expectations, and support for this change. We attempt to fill this important gap in the literature through the analysis of two nationally representative surveys in the UK (n = 3034) and Canada (n = 941). This analysis highlights within- and between-country trends, including how the variation in responses regarding the "four Ds," demographic factors, and other variables may explain the differences we see in terms of support for energy system change in the UK and Canada. Our analysis also shows that there are common elements, including the importance of the decentralization, and especially the democratization of energy in shaping support. We hope that this study will help governments, industry, community groups, and local residents themselves in both countries come together to advance the kind of Local Smart Grids that address climate change and represent a supported, just energy transition. Graphical Abstract

Globally, smart city initiatives are becoming increasingly ubiquitous elements of complex, sociotechnical urban systems. While there is general agreement that cities cannot be smart without citizen involvement, the motivations, means, and mechanisms for engaging citizens remain contested. In response, this article asks what the role of citizens is in two recently established smart districts within the wider Smart Dublin programme: Smart Sandyford, a business district, and Smart Balbriggan, a town north of Dublin with Ireland’s most ethnically diverse and youthful population. Using multiple methods (online and in-person interviews, site visits, a focus group, and participant observation), this article specifically examines how the “quadruple helix,” a popular concept within innovation studies and one that is adopted in promotional materials by Dublin’s emerging smart districts, is used by key actors as an overarching framing device for activities. It finds that, to date, the quadruple helix concept is being applied simplistically and uncritically, without attention to pre-existing and persistent patterns of uneven power and influence between the different actors involved. As such it risks inhibiting rather than supporting meaningful citizen engagement for smart and sustainable places that both smart districts articulate as a key driver of their activities.

Proposed energy projects across rural working landscapes play an important role in energy transitions. While community engagement has been increasingly a part of these projects, instrumental motivations for engagement and the emphasis placed on achieving social acceptance has remained uncritically examined. Here, we aim to highlight relationships between actor rationale, the structuring of engagement processes, and how communities perceive the driving forces behind engagement practices. To do so, we draw on lived experiences of communities facing proposed shale gas and wind energy projects across rural working landscapes in the UK and Canada, respectively. We find that engagement is often perceived by community members as insincere, insufficient, ineffective and instrumentally-driven. We suggest that a more community-centered approach to engagement is necessary and will require a move beyond existing engagement and acceptance practice and frameworks. This can include creating more inclusive decision-making processes where powers are balanced and designing community engagement to incorporate multiple rationales beyond achieving social acceptance of energy projects.

To be fair, acceptable and ultimately successful, decentralised energy projects involving technological innovations require engagement with users, local communities and wider publics. Yet relatively few studies have adopted a dynamic, temporal approach to understand how publics are engaged with as projects develop over time. We address this gap by researching three case studies of ‘Smart Local Energy System’ (SLES) demonstrator projects involving combinations of power, heat and transport technologies funded under a UK government programme. Guided by literature on public engagement methods and rationales, as well as how users and communities are framed by stakeholders, we track engagement approaches over time from stages of project initiation to technology deployment. Engagement defined as communication and consultation predominates over participation and community empowerment, with instrumental rationales used to frame publics as consumers enabling technology deployment. Disruptions to engagement attributed to external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and BREXIT were interpreted both positively and negatively, including the implications of disruptions for social inclusion and fairness. The potential for SLES to catalyse broader social transformations in a context of environment and climate emergency is discussed.

Energy transitions require engagement with users, local communities and wider publics in order to be fair, acceptable and, ultimately, successful. Here we focus on the development of decentralised energy systems instigated by central government. Smart Local Energy Systems (SLES), involving low carbon generation, demand sources and smart technologies in a geographically-bounded location, are important but unexplored contexts for public engagement. Drawing on 23 interviews with partner organisations in 12 UK SLES projects, we investigate the targets, methods and rationales of engagement. Partners engage a range of user and community groups around multiple energy system components using a variety of methods, directly and via intermediary organisations. Project size is not a major influence on breadth and intensity of engagement. Project partners rationalise practices with reference to characterisations of users and engagement, and practices are conditioned by a range of factors (e.g. technological boundaries, place, partners involved, and the wider organisational context within which SLES projects take place). We highlight a need for future SLES policy to emphasise engagement as a key facet, institute systematic social learning between SLES projects, and consider how to engage publics beyond the boundaries of individual projects.

As governments worldwide address the climate crisis, energy systems are becoming both decarbonised and decentralised. In this study, we aim to increase understanding of the spatial dimensions of new forms of decentralised energy systems that integrate electricity, storage, transportation, and heating. Drawing on workshops and secondary data from three, early-stage case studies funded under a UK government programme, we examine how stakeholders responsible for development construct the ‘local’ in Smart Local Energy System (SLES) demonstrators. We employ three analytical concepts to address this aim: emplacement, place-framing, and place/boundary-making. In terms of emplacement, stakeholders use place-based narratives that draw on distinctive infrastructural, social, ecological, and political characteristics to argue that diverse locations (Oxford city, Oxfordshire, and the Orkney Islands) are ‘suitable’ places for decentralised energy. Stakeholders frame projects around non-local goals of creating technological and business models for replication across the UK and worldwide, even if some community-centred benefits are recognized. Lastly, our findings on place-making show pragmatism in flexing ‘local’ boundaries in order to align with project objectives. The three analytical concepts provide a useful framework to uncover ‘local’ complexities of early-stage decentralised energy projects, and emphasise intersections of space, place, and justice that deserve further scrutiny, notably in later stages of project implementation.

Pattern-IT is a participatory, card sorting activity that aims to illuminate the relationships between people, technologies and concepts in complex systems. Pattern-IT combines two methods: card sorting [11] and mapping sentences [2,6]. Depending on the aims and scope of the research or topic, Pattern-IT can be used in an exploratory, descriptive, or interpretative manner. It is a co-created, adaptable and enjoyable method that can be used with individuals or groups, in-person or online, with or without facilitation. In this paper, Pattern-IT was conducted face-to-face in a moderated group setting using physical cards to explore engagement by project partners with publics involved in implementing Smart Local Energy Systems (SLES). SLES are decentralised energy systems that use information communication technologies (e.g. smart meters, blockchain, real-time pricing) to connect low carbon energy generation (e.g. solar PV) with energy storage and energy services (e.g. electric vehicles).•A method that combines card sorting and mapping sentences.•Uses mapping sentences as an organising and data generating tool.•A novel co-created participatory method for use with individuals or groups.

Most prison food research focuses on aspects of consumption rather than production yet farming, horticulture and gardening have been integral to the prison system in England and Wales for more than 170 years. This paper explores the interplay between penological, therapeutic and food priorities over the last fifty years through an examination of historical prison policies and contemporary case studies associated with the Greener on the Outside for Prisons (GOOP) programme. Findings are discussed in relation to how joined-up policy and practice can impact positively on whole population health and wellbeing within and beyond the prison setting.

A survey of South African secondary school students aged 12-17 years (n = 893) included measures designed to investigate relationships between beliefs about HIV/AIDS, condom use, interpersonal relationships, and two dependent measures: motivation to use condoms and reported condom use. We predicted that motivation would be an important correlate of reported condom use and that traditional cultural beliefs included in social cognition models would predict condom use motivation. Hierarchical multiple regression showed that 10% of the variance in reported condom use was accounted for by condom use motivation and age. Condom self-efficacy, beliefs about condoms and injunctive norms accounted for much of the variance. Other beliefs included susceptibility to HIV and attribution of HIV to asexual sources such as witchcraft indicating that an expanded model of modifiable cognitions may be optimal when designing HIV interventions among young South Africans.

Involvement in positive leisure activities is a key way for young people to develop resilience and social and emotional skills. This paper outlines the evaluation of a six-week surfing intervention, the Wave Project, which aimed to boost wellbeing and confidence among 84 young people aged eight to 18, all of whom faced mental health issues or social exclusion. The intervention resulted in a significant and sustained increase in wellbeing. One year later, 70% of clients regularly attend a surf club and many have become trained as session volunteers. Parents and referrers noticed an increase in positive attitude and better communication, as well as improved self-management and behaviour at both home and school It is concluded that the Wave Project provides a demonstrable and cost-effective way to deliver mental health care, mentoring and social integration of young people. Further service evaluation of accessibility and long-term outcomes is also recommended.

Background: This study evaluated the effects of a school-based intervention on cognitions and self-reported behaviours related to increased HIV risk amongst South African adolescents. Methods: The (“PREPARE”) intervention was based on the Information, Motivation, Behavioural skills model and incorporated 12 key messages into pre-existing health promotion in schools. The intervention was delivered by teachers in five 3-hour units over 5 weeks. A cluster-randomised trial involving 24 schools and 2588 adolescents aged 13-14 years in Limpopo, South Africa was employed to evaluate the intervention. Targeted beliefs, attitudes, norms, culture-specific beliefs and self-reported behaviours (e.g. condom use) were assessed via researcher-administered questionnaires at baseline and two months follow up. Findings: A series of targeted cognitions (e.g. condom use attitudes and self-efficacy) and self-reported condom use showed significant differences (p<.05) in favour of intervention participants. However, effect sizes were generally small (Cohen’s ds<.25). Discussion: A theory- and evidence- based intervention improved HIV-preventive education among South African adolescents.

PurposeFor over a decade, UK public sector construction policy and industry rhetoric has advanced a value agenda that advocates the development of project‐specific understanding of value. This study aims to examine construction practitioners’ collective cognition of value to determine how their facilitation may bias this intent. A value continuum is contributed.Design/methodology/approachCritique of the design quality indicator (the primary value agenda instrument) finds that it overemphasises objective value, confirming the need for practitioners to help stakeholders develop broader understanding of value. The freelisting technique of cultural anthropology is adopted to model practitioners’ collective cognition of value and, thus, their bias over this process. The standard freelisting protocol is followed.FindingsPractitioners’ collective understanding is found to comprise related concepts that resolve to a one dimensional “value continuum” with subjective and objective terminals and which fully embodies value agenda intent. In contrast, the concepts articulated by the design quality indicator are biased towards the objective value continuum terminal, confirming the need for practitioners to facilitate stakeholder exploration of the full continuum if the value agenda is to be fully addressed.Research limitations/implicationsThe value continuum only reflects the views of a small but typical sample of construction practitioners. Further work must characterise model completeness and consistency through the supply chain.Originality/valueThis is the first work to derive an empirical model of construction practitioners’ collective understanding of value. It achieves this by the novel linking of a cognitive modelling technique from cultural anthropology with an emic interpretation of the results.

In less than twenty years, we have seen tremendous changes in the demand mix worldwide spurred primarily by the dawn of the digital age with its ever more energy-hungry computers, server farms, telecommunication equipment, etc. The expected evolution in the electricity demand for the next 10–20 years is even more radical. While efficiencies in current electricity-using devices are expected to improve (e.g. lighting being the most prominent example), electricity demand has the potential to increase significantly because of the electrification of road transportation, combined with the demise of fossil fuels for space heating and the ever growing need for space cooling. Electricity is the energy carrier par excellence in a low-carbon world; therefore, demand for it will increase, if not significantly in the UK (see Ault et al., this volume), then certainly globally.

As this book ably demonstrates, there is a growing body of research on public beliefs, reactions and responses to large-scale renewable energy projects of various forms, often focused on case studies of controversy and local conflict. The profile of available cases has expanded significantly, covering a diversity of locations and contexts around the world and a wide range of types of renewable energy technology and modes of project development. Alongside the reporting of empirical research, there have also been various attempts to describe and characterize public responses to renewable energy projects and develop explanatory frameworks or predictive models. These include the NIMBY (‘Not in my back yard’) explanations of public opposition that are often favoured in media reporting and political debate (Toynbee, 2007), broad frameworks for thinking about social acceptance (Wustenhagen et al, 2007) and statistical models that characterize and measure variables that are believed to predict the nature of public opposition (Wolsink, 2000) or planning decision outcomes (Toke et al, 2008).