Telling tales: using stories to remake energy policy

Abstract

To benefit and protect the populace, government policies often promise aspirational changes to current practice. Different kinds of narratives are important in the framing, explanation, motivation, and understanding of policies and strategies. For example, the UK government's 2008 Climate Change Act proclaimed that all new homes will be zero carbon by 2016. This ‘hero story’, where society is ‘saved’ by clever technologies, is inspiring, positive and familiar. An alternative is the ‘learning story’, where things are not quite as simple as they first seemed. In a learning story, protagonists are normal people who need to overcome a challenge. In energy policy, the learning story could address the gap between the technical potential and what is achieved in practice. Three real-world examples from retrofit and new-build projects are used to show how implicit narratives can create conflict when the tellers (e.g. researchers) have to tell one kind of story but have data for the other. Recommendations are provided for a balanced approach to the deployment of different kinds of tales by policy-makers, researchers, implementers and users. Harnessing the learning story and developing a ‘caring story’ could motivate policy-makers and the public to invest effort in building performance.

Keywords:

• buildings
• energy policy
• performance gap
• public policy
• research challenges
• retrofit
• social context
• storytelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

Initial funding for this work was supported by the Phase II UK Energy Research Demand Theme [grant number NE/G007748/1]. Revisions were supported under Working with Infrastructure, Creation of Knowledge, and Energy strategy Development (WICKED) [grant number EP/L024357/1].

Notes

1 This paper is a revision of an earlier version presented at ECEEE, 3–8 June 2013 (Janda & Topouzi, 2013).

2 The first author is indebted to a facilitator of a 2007 World Business Council for Sustainable Development workshop for this terminology. His name is not remembered, but his terminology is.

3 Text for this section is taken largely from Janda and von Meier (2004)

4 See http://buildingdashboard.net/oberlin/ajlc/#/oberlin/ajlc/.

5 A ‘koan' is an unanswerable question used in Zen teaching. An example of a koan is ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?'

6 Text for this section is taken largely from Janda (2012b). The title quote is taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.

7 This statement has several interpretations, all of which are intended. These range from ‘What is promised in projects is not [cannot be] always delivered in entirety’ to ‘What is promised can be unrealistically optimistic’ to ‘What is promised is often influenced by the pressures of context and regime’.