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Objectives: This paper examines emerging models that are being adopted by organisations engaged in the low carbon transition, with a particular focus on the role played by social enterprises. It presents a case-based comparison of recent efforts by industry actors in the housing retrofit supply chain to deliver low-energy retrofits (or refurbishments) of existing housing stocks in the UK and France. Prior Work: The study adopts a multi-disciplinary approach which makes connections between three broad strands of research: (1); energy policy, with a focus on energy efficiency in buildings (e.g. Fawcett and Mayne 2012); (2) social and sustainable enterprise (e.g. Blundel et al. 2013, Gibbs and O’Neill 2012); (3) socio-technical transitions (e.g. Geels and Kemp 2006; Smith 2007, Killip 2013). Approach: The issues are examined through a comparative study of the low-energy housing retrofit policy environment and of current organisational structures and practices in the building industries of the UK and France. Industry responses to recent policy signals are explored in case materials that are based around reviews of published evidence and a series of semi-structured interviews with designers and contractors who have direct experience of innovative, low-energy refurbishment projects in each country. Results: The case study evidence suggest that while the two countries have comparable long-term policy goals for CO2 emissions reduction, there are important organisational differences displayed in the more immediate initiatives being undertaken by industry actors involved in delivering retrofitting of the housing stock. The discussion section indicates possible explanations for these differences and highlights issues requiring further investigation. Implications: The transition towards a more environmental sustainable residential housing depends largely on social, as opposed to technological, innovation. Policy-makers need to address specific organisational constraints, including the longstanding fragmentation evident in this part of the UK building industry. The cases suggest that there is considerable scope for reconfiguring traditional networks and for giving greater emphasis to collaborative arrangements involving private sector firms, social and community based enterprise. Value: The study provides new empirical insights into the organisational dimensions of an important sustainability transition. It also makes a contribution to theoretical development by combining insights from several distinct disciplines, and by applying concepts from energy research, organisational studies, social entrepreneurship and socio-technical transitions to recent development in the UK and French building industries. It also identifies several implications for future research policy and practice.

Topic: This paper reports on our experiences in running a pilot ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) project that addresses the issue of ‘sustainable growth’ by engaging SME owners and managers in facilitated workshop discussions on this important, yet highly contested topic. If the UK and other countries are to meet their carbon reduction obligations, it is clear that SMEs will need to make significant, and in some cases radical changes, not only in terms of their day-to-day operational practices but also in their longer-term trajectories. However, policymakers face substantial obstacles in communicating with this audience, including: the scale and diversity of the SME population, competing priorities, competitive pressures and resource constraints. This project combines published research on SMEs, their growth processes and environmental behaviours, with specialist expertise in SME engagement and climate change communication.\ud \ud Aim: The multi-partner collaboration is designed to co-create new knowledge on environmentally sustainable growth in SMEs. Its primary aim is to help SMEs and intermediaries gain a better understanding of sustainable growth and its implications for their businesses. The team designed and trialled an innovative approach engagement, based on facilitated workshop discussions, creating an initial evidence base that will be coupled with a set of practical recommendations. The project builds on the academic and external partners’ complementary research insights into SMEs, organisational growth, climate change communication, energy use and associated policy-making. By incorporating the expertise of the practical insights of practitioners and intermediary organisations, the project seeks to initiate a vigorous knowledge exchange about the conceptualisation and practical application of sustainable growth.\ud \ud Methodology: Prior to engaging with SMEs, the team conducted a review of the literature on sustainable growth, which informed the engagement phase of the project. We also conducted a small survey of SME owners and managers and engaged in an informal consultation with stakeholders that informed the design and contents of the pilot workshops. Two half-day workshops were organised with SME owner and manager participants, facilitated by the communications specialists, Climate Outreach, and drawing on previous engagement projects with hard to reach groups. The workshops provided a forum for participants to engage in grounded, ‘peer to peer’ discussion about sustainable growth, expressed in their own terms and drawing on their own values and narratives. Audio recording of the workshops provided the basis for a thematic analysis, which has been combined with the other sources to construct this working paper.\ud \ud Contribution: The project is generating new insights into SME perspectives on sustainable growth that are grounded in relevant theory and evidence, coupled with practical tools that will be of value to practitioners and policymakers. The project team has also developed audio-visual resources, which will be used to raise awareness and help to provide the foundations for future engagement activity. The aim of the next phase of the project is to further refine this approach to engagement in the form of a more fully developed ‘toolkit’ and associated resources.

Historically, energy demand reductions have been the main driver of carbon emission reductions. However, there is concern that this contribution is not recognised, and that policymaking attention remains focused on the supply side. The current and potential future role of demand in energy policymaking is explored via surveys of energy experts and stakeholders in the UK (n>77), the Netherlands (n>54) and Germany (n>80). In all three countries, the respondents identify some current policy support on the demand side, especially in the context of retrofitting. On the whole, however, they suggest that decarbonisation policies mainly support technological substitution, infrastructure investment and vector switching on the supply side. This focus, to the detriment of funding/finance and changing practices, does not appear conducive to a just transition to net zero. To help energy policy contribute to such as transition, the respondents support the Energy Efficiency First principle which entails a better balance between supply and demand solutions. While German respondents have a strong preference for technological solutions, UK and Dutch respondents support more policymaking emphasis on the demand side, especially through changing practices such as a modal shift to active travel. Overall, German respondents appear broadly content with current policy, Dutch respondents have the greatest faith in policymakers, and UK respondents are neither content with current policy nor do they have faith in policymakers. Despite these discrepancies, trends among responses from all three countries suggest that energy and climate policy solutions appear more suitable for decarbonisation than ensuring justice and fairness of the underlying socio-technical transformation process. This suggests that both energy and non-energy policies need to be more closely aligned to gain more legitimacy and ultimately succeed in achieving net zero.

International audience; Improvement of energy efficiency may, in many ways, be beneficial for the economy and society. Energy efficiency programs, however, are often assessed based on energy savings only, without considering the socioeconomic benefits. Therefore, the entire benefit from energy efficiency in national economies and in the global dimension is significantly underappreciated. The basic aim of this paper is to demonstrate the multiple benefits from improving energy efficiency and to analyse them based on selected case studies.

The multiple benefits of energy efficiency for individual businesses have not received sufficient research attention. For firms, these non-energy benefits may be critically important to their investment decisions. This paper presents initial results from a project investigating the firm-level strategic benefits of energy efficiency. Using a rapid evidence assessment method, the literature on multiple benefits in firm-level energy efficiency decisions was reviewed. This encompassed academic, conference and grey literature, with thousands of items scanned, leading to 31 documents being read in detail. This process confirmed that relatively little has been published on the topic. Nevertheless, there is evidence that strategic non-energy benefits do exist, e.g. reduced production down-time, increased product quality or improved productivity. These benefits can positively and significantly influence the financial assessment of energy efficiency projects. However, such benefits are generally not reported, quantified or included in project assessment. Of the existing studies, most seek to monetise non-energy benefits in order to expand the scope of conventional cost-benefit analysis. However, some take a radically different approach, based on the observation that energy efficiency and energy payback are often not salient to firm-level decision-makers, who have other priorities and ways of evaluating project proposals. Instead of taking energy efficiency as the starting point (and cost-benefit as the assessment method), these studies seek to understand the priorities of investment decision-makers and to propose means by which energy efficiency can be integrated into their decisions in ways which are more salient. The work involved can be time-consuming and places a responsibility on researchers to understand topics and business practices that may be new or only partly understood by experts in energy efficiency. There is very little evidence and work done in support of the ‘salience approach’, but what there is suggest that it holds promise for increasing the take-up of energy efficiency at the point of firm-level investment decisions. There is a need for further research to take forward this idea, both in terms of providing more case-study evidence, but also in refining the idea itself.

This short report describes the methodology followed to select a group of energy system components for further assessment in the first phase of SPLiCE. As the next step we will investigate the existence of significant evidence gaps in relation to direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of the energy system components identified in this stage. The DECC calculator was used as the starting point for the selection of the energy system components which were presented to the stakeholders. The criteria and related scoring system was decided to reflect the aim of Worksteam1 in SPLiCE, i.e. investigate the existence of significant evidence gaps in relation to direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of a decarbonised energy system. After circulating a web survey usable responses from about 50 stakeholders were obtained. Based on our interpretation of the data we propose that as a next step we investigate significant evidence gaps in relation to direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of the following energy system components.

This chapter presents a scheme to motivate individuals to reduce their carbon emissions from electricity use and other sources. Consequences of global climate change are appearing faster than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This highlights the importance of introducing new, efficient schemes for mitigation of global warming. One such scheme is Personal Carbon Allowance (PCA), whereby individuals are allotted a tradable ration of CO2 emissions per year. The chapter reviews the fundamentals of PCA and analyzes its merits and problems. The United Kingdom and Denmark have been chosen as case studies because the energy situation and the institutional setup are quite different between these two countries. As the chapter concludes, PCA is an idea worthy of serious further consideration. PCA is a promising approach that urgently requires a much greater research effort to see if it could be an important part of future carbon and energy policy.