Multi-stakeholder and trans-disciplinary collaborations
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Technology Collaboration Programmes (TCPs) highlight, in their name, the importance of research and technology collaborations. Over 6000 scientists partake in the 38 TCPs. We believe that IEA DSM Task 24 has created one of the most extensive and engaged expert collaborations, extending its reach to all sciences studying behaviour and other “Behaviour Changers” from government, industry, the community and service sectors. The entire premise of the Task 24 “Behaviour Changer Framework” (Rotmann, 2016) is based on facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations. We will utilise and build on these networks (Subtask 1) and collaboration tools in this Task. We will specifically aim to co-create and -test an internationally-validated, standardised research process in this Task (see Subtask 3).
Task aims and research process
The primary aim of the Task is to enable participating countries to improve policy, industry, research and community outcomes focusing on hard-to-reach energy users, by applying insights and lessons learned from collaboration with other countries and global experts.
Our Project Partner See Change Institute (SCI) has developed a process to identify and test programme variables as the “ABCDE building blocks of behaviour change”. This process is aimed at helping Behaviour Changers better design, implement, and evaluate such programmes. This process, which we will utilise for case study analyses and in any field pilots to be developed as part of the Annex, contains the following elements:

Diagram of the “Building Blocks of Behaviour Change” Research Process
To summarise our research process (see diagram above): Each phase includes both qualitative and quantitative research to marry inductive and deductive strategies of learning.
First, the overarching, shared programme or policy goals are discovered in the context of the existing landscape of work and the mandates of key stakeholders. Second, the target audience and behaviours are defined through mixed-methods customer research and modelling. Then, the interventions can be designed to address specific audience and behavioural needs and key content and delivery variables can be “pretotyped” via experimental and usability testing. Finally, once the intervention has been optimised based on empirical data, it can be deployed and evaluated in a pilot study, using both process and impact evaluation to determine not only whether it worked but how it can be continuously improved over time.
Storytelling
Storytelling will continue to be our overarching language and method of ‘translation’ between different countries, sectors, and disciplinary jargons. We will continue to explore the power of storytelling in its many forms, as outlined in our 2015 eceee summer study paper and our Special Issue in Energy Research and Social Sciences called ‘Storytelling and narratives in energy and climate change research’ (see Rotmann, 2017). Task 24 has also published an ‘A-Z of storytelling’ report (Rotmann, 2018). In addition, we are collaborating with Dr. Rick Davies on assessing ParEvo, a web-assisted participatory scenario planning process that is based on storytelling methods.