Co-creating a community visioning methodology for energy transitions: Principles, practices, and reflections

Visions of energy futures produced via co-created methodologies can provide robust alternatives to the prevailing imaginaries held by international and state actors – crucial for sustaining progress towards energy transitions that meet community needs and realities. This paper explores the co-creative design of a methodology for community visions for energy transitions. Insights are drawn from the development and outputs of a collaborative workshop aimed at adapting community visioning to different local contexts with four partners from across Europe. We analyse empirical evidence, including transcripts of conversations with participating local authorities and NGO representatives and resources prepared for the workshop, to detail how collaboration proceeded. The results highlight that practices fostering inclusion, mutual learning, and relationship building can give partners ownership over visioning to better ensure that its design reflects local, situated knowledges and is well suited to communities. However, the messy, human nature of co-creation requires commitment to flexibility and ongoing dialogue. Overall, the experiences highlighted in this paper serve as a valuable resource for future researchers and practitioners interested in exploring how to further energy system transformation and support community-driven local energy transitions. • For fairer energy futures, we must examine how futures are envisioned. • This paper explores the co-creative design of community visioning. • Co-creative visioning design identifies locally-specific ways to discuss energy. • Researchers’ attention to context and flexibility can support energy transition.