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Promoting energy-saving behaviour: formal social groups as promising middle actors for municipal interventions

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Abstract

City governments worldwide are trying to motivate their citizens to reduce their energy use—a particular challenge as they try to reach individual households. A promising strategy to engage the public broadly entails collaborating with middle actors to multiply the effects of municipal interventions. Some of these middle actors are formal social groups (e.g. sports clubs and neighbourhood associations). We conducted an online experiment (N = 136) to determine whether such interventions were more effective when they are communicated through formal social groups than when communicated through city governments. Participants received letters containing advice for saving energy in the household. Willingness to participate was higher when the letters came from formal social groups than when they came from a city agency. Furthermore, actual members of formal social groups generally were more willing to participate. Our evidence suggests that formal social groups are promising middle actors for energy conservation campaigns and that city governments should engage more often with these groups to communicate with residents.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks go to Yann Blumer for his valuable feedback and contributions to the study, to Stephanie Moser for her valuable feedback and to our practice partners in the project, representatives of the cities of Baden, Winterthur and Zug. We thank Sandro Bösch for designing the prompts. Further information about the project ‘Promoting energy-sufficient behaviour in cities’ can be found here: http://www.nrp71.ch/en/projects/module-4-acceptance/promoting-energy-efficient-behaviour. This research project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It is part of the National Research Programme ‘Managing Energy Consumption’ (NRP 71) of the SNSF (further information can be found at www.nrp71.ch).

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  1. Institute of Sustainable Development, ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Technoparkstrasse 2, 8401, Winterthur, Switzerland

    Vivian Frick & Corinne Moser

  2. Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft (ZTG), Technische Universität Berlin, Hardenbergstr. 16-18, 10623, Berlin, Germany

    Vivian Frick

  3. D-USYS TdLab, ETH Zürich, Universitätstrasse 16, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Roman Seidl & Michael Stauffacher

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  1. Vivian Frick
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Frick, V., Seidl, R., Stauffacher, M. et al. Promoting energy-saving behaviour: formal social groups as promising middle actors for municipal interventions. Energy Efficiency 10, 1539–1551 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-017-9543-2

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