We propose ten recommendations for campaigners to strengthen their energy advocacy in Europe. These are rooted in four future scenarios of how public perceptions and mindsets around European energy independence could evolve in the coming months. We suggest specific strategic approaches, narrative framing and tactics that could be helpful for a just, green, and solidary transition.

The time is now. While environmental groups are exposing the costs of Russian oil and the European Commission is promoting individual energy savings, the French far-right insists that the people’s purchasing power on energy is a core right, and countries are pledging to let coal nuclear power stay longer.

The Overton window of opportunity to create solidarity around reductionism and energy independence a norm is slowly closing down.

Opportunities: What to Focus on?

Just the Right Size of Challenge

In contrast to a general carbon emission reduction, phasing out Russian fossil fuels is a big enough task to be a relevant contribution while still being tangible enough to build a coherent action plan with short term milestones. It is also much easier to communicate as an ask.

Energy-saving, efficiency and sufficiency

The most significant opportunity is to create advances in energy-saving and demand reduction in Europe. Every analytical report or plan on energy independence emphasises that it is impossible to achieve without savings and reduction. Europe will only become energy independent if its citizens, businesses, and governments work together to support collective actions and new social norms, pass new legislation, and encourage purpose-driven companies to lead rather than follow. Now is the time to make it loud and clear. Polls show that many people are still undecided if they support demand reduction as a way to increase energy independence. Using the Overton window to convince the undecided is an opportunity to establish saving plans that allow ambitious reductions.

A focus on promoting energy saving also ensures that war objectives do not compete with environmental goals but supplement them instead without reiterating.

New Audiences

There is a chance to reach audiences that are typically not susceptible to ecological arguments but would be motivated by other values, like independence or solidarity with Ukraine. A clear connection between the Ukraine war and energy has already been established, making a usually technical debate much more emotional. It’s not necessary to reach out to the already-converted environmentalists. Now is the chance to rally support from audiences that would not usually support energy-saving objectives for environmental reasons.

How to do it?

We strongly recommend moving away from the strategy of broadcasting our ideas and demands to one that manages the emerging narrative in a way that establishes norms that define energy consumption for people and businesses. These norms then drive ambition and possibilities for energy legislation.

Managing narratives requires deep engagement with audiences to listen and understand and to create ownership, pride, and agency. These are a few things you can do:

1. Co-create an energy-saving plan

Engage people in developing an energy-saving plan to become less dependent on Russian imports. Co-creation will help you provide pride and agency to people and kickstart the discussion of new norms. Engaging people does not mean that you can’t be propositional nor that you can’t already suggest immediate action as, for example, has been done by the GP CEE release “Unhooking Europe from Oil”. Consider your action plan as a draft and publicly invite comments and amendments. Provide the history of the development of your saving plan and which consultation initiatives resulted in the revision.

• Give them a voice by asking their opinion. You can use polling, conversational engagements, or citizen assemblies to create an atmosphere of participation that allows for ownership development.
• Make sure you intensively communicate the results of these interactions both to your audiences and decision-makers. Show insights and tell stories in ways that allow other people to identify with those who have expressed their opinions — “They are like me, I can also think that.”
• Display a diverse range of demographic and value-group-specific perspectives, feelings, and experiences. Make sure you involve diverse voices, so they can further tell their stories. Go where your audience is, do not expect them to come where you usually go.
• Designing multiple events can provide reasons to communicate the participatory insights continuously (make multiple small surveys instead of one large one). If creating citizen assemblies, make sure to have a strong communication strategy throughout these.
• Coordinate with numerous allies to broaden your outreach. Try to reach beyond your bubble and get faith groups, unions, and businesses on board. Look for the unlikely allies that, if joining your cause, would be the most potent messengers.

2. Make your savings visible, quantitative, and accountable

Make the objectives in your plan tangible by adding numbers to them.

• Add saved tonnes and gas, coal, or petrol to each measure.
• Constantly communicate how the impact grows as more significant parts of society, including businesses, join the effort.
• Show how much a combination of measures could save in the short and medium-term, for example, by next winter.
• Put your plan in the context of an overall effort to reduce fossil fuel dependency on Russia.

Once you have started to track the progress, create metrics and gamify ways to register and communicate personal savings, be it from individuals, groups, or companies. Create multiple ways to communicate results and allow people to celebrate it as their contribution to creating independence and supporting Ukraine.

3. Aim to unite people behind some ideas supported by majorities

The intention behind promoting any solution or saving plan should be to create unity. As you saw in the scenarios, the most significant risk of no-transition is to have divided societies.

• Choose less contentious issues to serve as your poster child. For instance, the Italian 25C limit for air-conditioning. But do not use ideas most people can’t identify with as “Der Spiegel” did in this article, picking on the unwillingness of Germans to take cold showers in winter.
• Instead of exposing wrong solutions and villains (unless the villains are the same as in the war), focus on telling the right solutions that don’t further divide. At least as long as you are in the honeymoon phase (see below).

You want to line up many people behind a collectively developed saving plan, so start with the solutions people can quickly agree to and strengthen norms rather than stalling progress, creating disputes, and tiring out the process. Most people will instead support the general ideas of the plan and will leave the details to trusted experts.

4. Congratulate the effort and sacrifice

Making an effort or even making sacrifices is necessary to make people feel proud of their actions. So do not avoid talking about them. When a widely shared common good is established, like in this case, to show solidarity with Ukraine and get economic independence from Russia, people feel good about making an effort and talking about it. One can compare it to people’s efforts and sacrifices to compete in sports, either at events or on sports apps. But people also want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. When does the time of sacrifice end?

• Define and communicate more considerable sacrifices like travel constraints, high energy prices for heating/cooling, or transport as temporal. For example, by showing when energy efficiency programs for housing will show impact.
• For sacrifices that take longer time, you should prioritise communication on the short-term goal over the long-term perspective. For example, establishing a speed limit and its associated sacrifices will not change once people have switched to electric vehicles.

5. Showcase or create visible innovators and early movers

To successfully promote new political frameworks and societal norms, we aspire to create the action as soon as possible.

• Provide people and businesses with opportunities to take action immediately.
• Report about these early movers. Shift the reporting intentionally from being the heroes to being the new normal.

6. Create and celebrate new norms

Gradually raise the bar and establish the new standards as normal even before they become law.

• Communicate people’s contributions to progress by showing how a particular action is becoming less extraordinary and more normal or every-day (dynamic norm messaging).
• You can use some degree of shaming to motivate laggards, but focus more on communicating achieved success.

7. Build pride and identity

Connect the new norms to new or old identities. For example, if your target audiences are nationalists, you can link energy-saving plans as norms to their national identity (good Germans drive no faster than 100km/h). And yes, it does not help if you are saying it; you need nationalism, aka peers expressing it. If they are a faith group, make it a feature of their compassion; if they just have found purpose in organising themselves to help Ukrainian refugees, make it the new norm for these people. The same applies to businesses. “Increasing numbers of food retailers are committed to saving 20% of energy in the next eight months.” A good example is the different professional groups emerging within the XR or FFF movement. And always remember that the identity group members need to spread the norm and not outsiders that impose it.

• The identities you appeal to or create must be 1) something people can be proud of and 2) something people can share with people they are interested in (peer identities).
• Create symbols and rituals that people can connect to these identities.
• Create platforms where people can connect and build communities around them.

8. Monitor the shifts in your audiences

Make the best use of the efforts of various research organisations to study the changes in public opinion. This information can indicate the trends around the mindsets and behaviours that matter and highlight the challenges and opportunities ahead. As an example, we gathered the research available in April and May 2022 on public opinion in Europe around the support for energy policies and other relevant sentiments that would influence this, when creating our scenarios.

If possible, you could set up a monitoring process yourself to complement the polls and other studies of others, documenting the baseline and shifting public opinion around your specific action plan. Research data can also continuously be published to support normative shifts.

9. Propose, guard, and maintain fairness

For the public to support the plan, the sacrifices taken must be perceived as fairly shared between different societal groups. Be extremely sensitive and listen to any narrative of injustice that evolves. Spotting toxic narratives might require social media monitoring and regular conversations with a diverse group representing your audience.

10. Counter divisive forces, and don’t divide

Be mindful and vigilant in your response to divisive forces. Russian propaganda trolls, endangered vested interests, or other domestic agents will try to prevent you from succeeding. They will do it by dividing your audiences, polarising people, or fostering anger, anxiety, and frustration. Be on top of the narrative war.

• Use frames that stress positive European values, which would almost make it impossible, weird or ridiculous to do the opposite. For example, “Europeans have always been for peace.” “Europeans are the innovators; it’s unimaginable that we cannot solve this in a green way.”
• Monitor, expose, and counter upcoming narratives.

The Timing Matters

Be mindful of the stages that people collectively advance through as they move through a crisis and design your campaign accordingly:

The Honeymoon Phase (now slowly fading)

The honeymoon phase is the best phase to align people behind a joint plan. Now you want to create collective ownership, as people are naturally prone to being inclusive. It is also when benevolence or even altruism prevails, and large parts of society share the wish to support those suffering most. Use this time to shape and align people behind the action plan and evolve emotions that motivate support for norms. Abstain from attacking others (besides the common enemy) during this phase. Rather, facilitate unity. Maintain people’s feelings of purpose and pride by giving them agency to prolong the emotions of the honeymoon phase.

The Disillusionment Phase

In the following disillusionment phase, people naturally retreat. Frustration, denial, and societal fragmentation increase. During this phase, divisive forces find it much easier to be successful. Now you need to care the most to maintain support and push for progress to avoid the impression of stagnation. Use stories to inform people about their psychological vulnerability and how divisive forces exploit it. Provide them with purpose, pride, and community. Create shared targets for people to direct their anger. Set milestones and help people see the end of the tunnel. When the light at the end of the tunnel is emotionally clear to them, they can move on to the next phase, the recovery phase.

For more information on engaging with different psychological stages of a crisis, consult the Crisis Handbook.

Mindworks is a social and cognitive science lab. We support changemakers in their mission to change mindsets and behaviour, to protect and conserve the environment and to promote peace. Mindworks supports operations across the world with an emphasis on the Global South.

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