dr. L. (Lise) Jans

Speak Up

Speak Up is a 3-year Interreg North Sea Region project with 12 partners across 6 countries on effective citizen community engagement and participation.

In close collaboration with governmental partners that organize public participation panels on sustainability and other topics, we examine how to promote constructive dialogue among people with diverse viewpoints. In a ‘living lab’ we test the effects of different set-ups in terms of context, structure, and content of the conversation.

Read on the progress of this project here: https://www.interregnorthsea.eu/speak-up

EC2- Energy Citizenship and Energy Communities for a Clean Energy Transition

Energy citizenship – the active involvement and empowerment of the people in the energy sector – is a cornerstone to achieve a clean-energy transition and to build a low carbon and resilient future in the European Union within the next decades. Energy communities – non-commercial market actors in the energy sector – can help to achieve this goal once their potential is known and acknowledge by the citizens of the EU. Hence, the overarching objective of this proposed research is to scale-up both energy citizenship and energy communities to achieve greater social acceptability and more durable governance arrangements via actionable policy recommendations for policy makers. To this end, we employ a transdisciplinary team of experts to (i) develop a psychological conceptualization to understand what it takes to become an energy citizen, (ii) identify legal and socio-economic market factors that can hinder or promote an emergence of and engagement of citizens in energy communities, (iii) experimentally test and gather quantitative-empirical evidence for these factors, psychological underpinnings, and for the conduciveness of energy citizenship for broader sustainable policy goals, (iv) use insights from the empirical work to foster the co-creation of digital tools with stakeholders to overcome barriers, (v) distill and disseminate the gained knowledge on local, national and EU-level. This project is funded by the European Commision (Horizon 2020).

Smart Farmer Grid 2.0

This project aims to study the optimal design of a smart grid infrastructure in rural argicultural areas. We will study techonological, rural, social and behavioural aspects that promote the efficiency of rural smart energy infrastructures. The project is funded by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).

http://www.rvo.nl/subsidies-regelingen/projecten/smart-farmer-grid-20

The power of the neighbourhood: the success and spreading of bottom-up initiatives at the energy market 

This project aims to examine individual and social factors influencing the success and spreading of local sustainable energy initiatives that encourage local residents to reduce their CO2 emissions by adopting renewable energy sources and engaging in energy saving behaviours. The project is funded by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).

http://www.rvo.nl/subsidies-regelingen/projecten/de-kracht-van-de-buurt-het-succes-en-de-spreiding-van-bottum-initiatief-op-de-energiemarkt

Reconciling individuality with social solidarity: Forming social identity from the bottom up

During the last decades, Western societies have become increasingly individualistic. Many people fear that this gain in individual freedom threatens solidarity in society. The individual and the collective are assumed to be in opposition. But is this assumption always correct? Or is it possible to form groups in which individual distinctiveness and group membership can come into agreement? We propose that individual group members can actively contribute to the formation of shared group identity—a bottom-up (inductive) process that involves each group member as an individual. While being a distinctive individual can be difficult when group identity is formed on the basis of commonalities (a mechanical or deductive process) as might be the case in the army or the police, my dissertation shows that individuality can be reconciled more easily with strong social solidarity when group identity is formed inductively (or organically) out of individuals’ contributions. This project was funded by the Graduate School of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen