Improving your empowerment

Improving your empowerment through resources and advise

Welcome to this journey of individual and collective empowerment related to the energy system.  If you have walked directly towards this option – or if you have reached it after following the process referred to in the previous sections – it is probably because you already feel you have confidence in your ability to act autonomously, sufficient knowledge and control over the energy system. What we want to show you here are some additional options that can help you to increase your voice and your options in the wider energy system.

Please,  click HERE to start your empowerment journey with a series of questions about yourself and your motivations. These questions will help you get to know yourself better and reflect on where you are right now on the path to empowerment.

Once you have finished them, we present some information that we have extracted from informants from other initiatives and that may be interesting for you. We will do this by starting by introducing you to some good practices that have been developed in different European contexts, as examples of options and opportunities that open up on your path to energy transition, and then we want to alert you to some of the risks that can occur in the process of becoming an empowered energy citizen. We do not want to be alarmist about this, so in addition to showing you the reflections of our informants, we will offer you some tips, ideas, and alternatives that they themselves have adopted to solve their possible disempowerment:

• Good practices: transforming agency
• Reflections of ENCI stakeholders’ difficulties in attaining power 

We intend to finish this section by offering you a selection of final resources that may be useful to you as part of your empowerment process through an energy citizenship initiative. To accmplish this, we must consider that the emergence and development of ENCI depend on a variety of factors. Many of these may be classified as internal, the motivations and goals of the specific ENCI cases; the types of stakeholders and their roles in and perception of ENCI; dynamics over time (changes in number and type of stakeholders involved, in funding mechanisms, in impact achieved, in goals and aims, etc.); available resources and capabilities; but equally important are the external factors, in tohter words the ones that are relevant to and affect the ENCI case, yet are largely beyond the control of the stakeholders involved in the case:

Regarding internal factors, we would like to would stress the relevance of the resources that you have at your disposal - both personal-psychological, social, and material, which can be of major assistance on the pathway towards your individual empowerment and with a view to collective empowerment within the ENCI initiative.

We draw this section on internal factors to a close by mentioning how to foster participatory governance within your ENCI initiative. Subsequently, we will refer to the external factors that have been classified into six categories: political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological, and legal. These factors are considered within a methodological tool called PESTEL analysis. Moreover, as a support resource at your disposal, we will conclude by mentioning information regarding intermediary agents:

• Participatory governance (PDF 7.3)
• Technical, political, and regulatory knowledge: PESTEL analisis (PDF 7.4)
• Social knowledge and interaction with like-minded people: the role of intermediaries (PDF 7.5.)