Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research

Moezzi, Mithra; Janda, Kathryn B.; Rotmann, Sea

doi:10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.034

Cited by 315 publications

(181 citation statements)

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“…While this research cannot offer explanatory power for the differences in transition narratives, it does suggest lines of inquiry, for example, exploring the influence of organizational history and type, and physical location. A variety of analytical, comparative, and reflective approaches and uses for narratives are available (Paschen and Ison, 2014;Jasanoff, 2015;Avelino et al, 2017;Becker and Naumann, 2017;Moezzi et al, 2017) as well as complementary approaches such as modeling and historical research on regional transitions, which could help to overcome limitations of initiative-based learning (Turnheim et al, 2015). Likewise, energy futures research based on these narratives may help build capacity among relevant social groups to understand and transform energy systems and inform democratic debate and technological development (Grunwald, 2011;Miller et al, 2015).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The practical implication then is that the functions of these initiatives and their narratives are not mutually exclusive and may facilitate joint policy-making and activism (Becker and Naumann, 2017). Employed flexibly and strategically as a co-productive synthesis, a shared narrative may serve to complement, integrate and tie together diverse initiatives, organizations, and campaigns for energy systems change, increasing their collective prominence and motivating action toward a positive and comprehensive vision of the future (Jasanoff, 2015;Avelino et al, 2017;Becker and Naumann, 2017;Bushell et al, 2017;Moezzi et al, 2017;Hess, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Likewise, given their greater emphasis on historical episodes, specific adversaries, imbalances of social power, and negative as well as positive dimensions of the future, public partnership and social movement narratives may prove more useful for helping agents make sense of and respond to past, present, and future events or trends and better appreciate what is at stake. These narratives do not focus narrowly on political targets but rather offer broad and detailed visions that may lead to more integrated approaches and a wider set of solutions for renewable energy transitions (Moezzi et al, 2017). On the other hand, the local and regional narrative, and the social movement narrative to some degree, may serve to inspire concrete actions by emphasizing direct benefits of renewable energy to people's everyday lives and by stressing local community identity, thus appealing to psychological and sociological drivers of behavior change (Bushell et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shared Yet Contested: Energy Democracy Counter-Narratives

Burke

2018

Front. Commun.

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Conventional ways of communicating about the transition to renewable energy in North America presuppose that energy systems can be changed while sustaining existing social, political, and economic relations. Energy democracy counters such ostensibly apolitical narratives by emphasizing the socially transformative potential of this transition. Yet energy democracy, as both organizing principle and social movement, is itself increasingly recognized as flexible and contested. This research seeks to better discern and understand the practices and implications of energy democracy and its variants through synthesis and qualitative analysis of transition counter-narratives drawn from public communications of energy democracy initiatives actively working in northeastern North America. Transition narratives are examined through four constituent elements: collective-action frames that define problems, solutions, and motivations for sociotechnical change; discourses that describe values and norms of members of the communities of interest; sociotechnical imaginaries that describe and prescribe futures to be attained; and stories that connect past, present, and future and identify specific agents and adversaries to change. The research finds a set of diverse organizations across the region taking up and giving shape to the concept and goals of energy democracy, revealing a convergence among these initiatives around commitments to a socially transformational shift to collectively-controlled renewable energy systems. A comparison of transition narratives suggests distinct and potentially competing approaches to energy democracy, or multiple energy democracies, described as local and regional communities, public partnerships, and social movements. These energy democracies express differences in terms of social groups to be connected and empowered, theories of change and stability, form and specificity of institutional change, resistance to negative as well as promotion of positive agendas, and ability to work across scales. These differences can and perhaps must activate a productive tension among multiple energy democracies working for and within a democratized renewable energy future for this region. The paper broadly contributes to research on sustainability transitions by examining and comparing transition narratives at trans-national and sub-national levels, proposing a descriptive and analytical typology of transition counter-narratives, and initiating a data set for future research on regional social-ecological-technical systems to strengthen initiative-based practice and learning. Keywords: energy democracy, renewable energy, transition narratives, social transformation, social movements, sociotechnical imaginaries Burke Energy Democracy Counter-Narratives INTRODUCTION: ENERGY DEMOCRACY AND TRANSITION NARRATIVESThe project of shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is now widely recognized for its political rather than strictly technological or economic dimensions (Cherp et al., 2018). A broad political m...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shared Yet Contested: Energy Democracy Counter-Narratives

Burke

2018

Front. Commun.

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“…Interviews, document analysis and more participatory methods have been used by those adopting narrative approaches to emerging energy publics and forms of democratic engagement (e.g., Moezzi et al, 2017;Raven, 2017;Smith et al, 2017). Drawing inspiration from the humanities and other creative disciplines these methods are used to derive stories and narratives which can then be used in a variety of engagements with marginalized or activist communities, as well as with policy-makers and other actors as tools for communication and engagement (Shirani et al, 2015).…”

Section: Methodological and Empirical Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy Democracies and Publics in the Making: A Relational Agenda for Research and Practice

Chilvers

Pallett

2018

Front. Commun.

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Mainstream approaches to energy democracy and public engagement with energy transitions tend to adopt specific, pre-given meanings of both "democracy" and "publics." Different approaches impose prescriptive assumptions about the model of participation, the identity of public participants, and what it means to participate well. The rigidity of many existing approaches to energy participation is increasingly being challenged by the ever-multiplying diversity of ways in which citizens participate in energy systems, as consumers in energy markets, protesters against new infrastructures and technologies, as initiators of community energy projects, and as subjects of behavior change interventions, amongst others. This paper is concerned with growing areas of scholarship which seek to understand and explore these emerging energy publics and forms of energy democracy from a relational perspective. Such work, grounded in constructivist and relational ontologies, views forms of participatory democracy and publics as being co-produced, constructed, and emergent through the performance of collective practices. It pays closer attention to power relations, politics, materiality, exclusions, and effects in both understanding and intervening in the making of energy democracy. This in turn shifts the focus from studying discrete unitary forms of "energy democracy" to one of understanding interrelations between multiple diverse energy democracies in wider systems. In this paper, we chart these developments and explore the significant challenges and potential contributions of relational approaches to furthering the theories, methods, and practices of energy democracy and energy public engagement. The paper draws on an expert workshop, and an accompanying review, which brought together leading proponents of contending relational approaches to energy participation in direct conversation for the first time. We use this as a basis to explore tensions between these approaches and set out a relational agenda for energy democracy research in terms of: developing concepts and theories; methodological and empirical challenges; and implications for practices of governance and democratic engagement with energy transitions.

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“…In particular, the emerging field of event attribution requires that events are plausibly simulated with numerical models (Stott et al, 2013;Hazeleger et al, 2015). In addition, single cases are often used as narratives to illustrate the complexity and linkage between components in 5 the hydrometeorological system (Moezzi et al, 2017;Zappa and Shepherd, 2017). Therefore, the performance of this model set-up in describing hydrometeorological extremes is assessed by showing the rainfall-runoff response and synoptic pattern of a selected extreme event for each basin.…”

Section: Measure Explanation Calculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An evaluation of the importance of spatial resolution in global climate and hydrological models based on the Rhine and Mississippi basins

Benedict¹,

Heerwaarden²,

Weerts³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Abstract.To study the global hydrological cycle and its response to a changing climate, we rely on global climate models (GCMs) and global hydrological models (GHMs). The spatial resolution of these models is restricted by computational resources and therefore limits the processes and level of detail that can be resolved. We assess and compare the benefits of an increased resolution for a GCM and a GHM for two basins with long observational records; the Rhine and Mississippi basins. Increasing shows no significant differences in discharge for both basins, likely because the hydrological processes depend highly on model parameter values that are not 10 readily available at high resolution. Increasing the resolution of the GCM improved the simulations of the monthly averaged discharge for the Rhine, but did not improve the representation of extreme streamflow events. For the Mississippi basin, no substantial differences in precipitation and discharge were found between the two resolutions input GCM and the two resolutions GHM. These findings underline that there is no trivial route from increasing spatial resolution to a more accurately simulated hydrological cycle at basin scale.

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Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research

Cited by 315 publications

References 71 publications

Shared Yet Contested: Energy Democracy Counter-Narratives

Shared Yet Contested: Energy Democracy Counter-Narratives

Energy Democracies and Publics in the Making: A Relational Agenda for Research and Practice

An evaluation of the importance of spatial resolution in global climate and hydrological models based on the Rhine and Mississippi basins

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