Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The paper reflects on the experience of embedding anthropological expertise into predominantly technology-oriented EU-funded projects focusing on energy and sustainable built environment. In a number of EU research funding programmes, there is a fairly recent shift in expectations, diverging from expert-led to more participatory models of designing and developing technical or non-technical solutions, reflecting the necessity of integrating social science and humanities into innovation processes, which had hitherto been primarily in the domain of technical sciences. The paper presents the model of a people-centred approach, acting as modus operandi of a project’s inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary development process. Drawing on a Horizon 2020 project NRG2peers, the paper explains the approach and methodology, implementation of the research process, and the research outcomes. NRG2peers is developing tools to support the uptake of next-generation (peer-to-peer) energy communities. Nine pilot communities from four European countries, embedded in different regulatory frameworks and socio-economic contexts, were part of the project’s ethnographic research. The paper therefore offers an insight into community energy initiatives, as well as discusses the transdisciplinary journey, in which non-anthropologists grapple with qualitative research and in which non-academics begin to consider ethnographic data as the key starting point of product and service development processes.

Presenters

Sara Arko
Field Expert, Department for Applied Social Science Research, Institute for Innovation and Development of University of Ljubljana, Slovenia