Making sense of sustainability, energy policies and citizens' related domestic behaviour. A case study in Germany

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to illustrate the main results of a German case study on citizen awareness and habits regarding sustainability, energy consumption and related public policies. A specific methodological tool, called STAVE, has been developed in order to create evidence about citizens’ daily energy-related behaviour at home and to investigate their motives, activities and obstacles as to saving energy. The results show how participants are aware that energy use is strongly linked to environmental issues and climate change. Moreover, they are able to deliver a rich picture of their everyday energy use at home including motives and barriers to save energy. Another major topic that goes beyond reasoning about energy use at home is the question of the social aspects of sustainability. Thus, there were interactions about the connections between social status and the opportunity to engage in a sustainable lifestyle. In this sense, the methodology used allows raising some contradictions and paradoxes among participant discourses, and it seems clear that to live in a sustainable way is a major challenge for participants. According to the recent literature, the need for a means to support policy making for sustainability by exploring the complexities of environment-related citizen behaviours is evident. In this sense, the STAVE method provides a procedure and a set of techniques that can be used in different ways to investigate and explore the patterns of sustainability-related practical reasoning and practical action deployed by citizens across a broad range of real-world settings.

Keywords

• public engagement
• sustainable development
• energy consumption
• public policies
• citizen participation