Community Visioning - a guide to co-creating clean energy futures

Other

Is your town or region facing the closure of a fossil fuel industry, the installation of renewable energy plants, or high energy prices? Do you want to foster collaboration on new energy developments, or build community energy initiatives? Have you and your neighbours ever wondered what the future could look like with a renewable, efficient, and sufficient energy system? Then this is the guidebook for you!

Community visioning can be part of a collaborative approach to transforming your energy systems, one that recognises and builds on your community’s existing knowledge. This guide can support you in designing and running visioning workshops that fit your community. It also offers opportunities to reflect on the role visioning can play in your energy planning.

About this guide

This guide was developed by the Clean Energy stream of SHARED GREEN DEAL. Academics, local authorities, and nongovernmental organisations came together to design and undertake co-creative community visioning for clean energy futures in Bełchatów, Poland; Granada, Spain; and Jaywick, the United Kingdom. The guide was first developed in April 2023 for community visioning workshops held from May 2023 to April 2024. Following these workshops, we updated the guide with lessons learned from this process, based on reflective interviews with the participants, facilitators, and organisers. In addition to guidelines, we have included quotes and case studies from this project to illustrate how community visioning can be implemented. 

Guidebook - Community visioning