Revealing the hidden side of energy transitions
In late March 2025 I was asked by Martine Holberton to deliver a talk on my PhD research at The Energy Charter’s Social Licence Community of Practice. This is a transcript of my talk.
My talk today will bring a slightly different angle to the human side of energy transitions from my PhD research. I hope it will stimulate some good conversations.
For three years from 2021 to 2023 I was immersed in the energy transition of the Upper Hunter Valley in NSW which is the traditional lands of the Wonnarua people.
The Hunter Valley is one of Australia’s largest coal mining areas, but over the next two decades 17 mines there will close, making around 130,000 hectares of mining land available for new uses. This represents a massive challenge environmentally, socially, and economically for the Upper Hunter Valley, a challenge that people in the Valley have long been aware of, even if the word “transition” has been verboten until relatively recently.
My involvement in the Hunter transition was at the invitation of the grassroots environmental network Hunter Renewal. With them I worked on two projects that brought the transition priorities of the Hunter community into NSW parliamentary debate. It was a life-altering experience that formed the fieldwork component of my PhD.
In exchange for using Hunter Renewal and their partner Hunter Jobs Alliance as a case study, I volunteered my expertise as a researcher, strategic designer, facilitation trainer, and communication designer. Reciprocity was my guiding light.
Through this work I learned many things, not the least what Ketan Joshi says in his 2020 book:
The roll-out of renewable energy won’t work unless it has a beating heart.
KETAN JOSHI — Windfall (2020)
As you all know, energy transitions are much more than technology or policy development or workforce planning or governance models. They are social processes as much as all these other things. I learned through my fieldwork that we need to spend more time understanding the human impacts of transitions.
When I started my PhD, my key research question was how to increase public participation in energy transitions. What I learned was that increased public participation will mean nothing if the affected community’s voice is not listened to. I realised I needed to adapt my inquiry to understand how to support community voices to be heard, respected, and to contribute to influencing change.
That tripartite framing comes from Susan Senecah’s Trinity of Voice model.
In looking at environmental decision-making in the U.S., Senecah found that the promises governments made about participation were not aligning to the actual experiences and expectations of the public. People took part because they wanted to make a difference but were not being listened to.
Senecah proposed a model for successful participation that comprised of:
- Access — supporting the potential for people to be heard
- Standing — supporting community to be respected as legitimate knowledge holders, and
- Influence — supporting community to contribute to change.
The two projects I worked on with community during my PhD were targetted at these three aims: that the community had the potential to be heard, that when heard their voices were respected as legitimate, and that they should have a role in making change.
The first project was timed to respond to changes to the Mining Act that were moving through the NSW parliament in 2021. The second built on findings from the first report and five years of previous engagement that revealed the local community are concerned that the Valley will be left economically and environmentally poorer without coordinated, long-term planning.
The image of the coal mine on the right represents one of the forgotten parts of energy transitions — in the rush to embrace the shift to renewables, the landscapes and the communities left behind are often forgotten.
The photo is of the Rix’s Creek Coal Mine which is owned by Bloomfield. That’s the town of Singleton in the background, dwarfed by the large, open cut coal mine in the foreground.
While this reality is a side of energy transitions that is often forgotten, or at least invisible to those not living near it, for those in the region it has a huge impact on them. Ignoring this reality puts social licence at risk because it negates people’s very real attachment to place.
I want to draw your attention to this forgotten side of energy transitions today because I think it needs to be thought of more when considering how to nurture the social licence for renewable energy projects, especially in regional areas that have been the beating heart of fossil fuel energy generation for a hundred or so years.
It is like when BHP closed their steelworks in Newcastle in 1997 after 84 years of operation. One of their guiding principles for closure, which was developed with unions, executives, and employee representatives, was that no employee would leave without dignity. This principle shaped their retirement packages, retraining opportunities, and more.
This dignified, human aspect to closure was crucial because of how embedded the steelworks were in the lives of generations of families from Newcastle. It was so much more than closure to them.
But respecting the legacy of a place and its people is not just a good thing to do from a human perspective, it also makes strategic sense. These communities, their histories, economies, and connection to landscapes can provide us with valuable knowledge that will improve how we do energy transitions. To gather this knowledge, we must respect people as humans, local experts, and partners.
A model I find useful to explain this is the Two Loops model from the Berkana Institute.
The version here is based on an interpretation by the British strategic designer and policy innovator Cassie Robinson.
The red line curving down from the top is the dominant system in decline — the coal industry in the Hunter’s case — and the blue line is the emerging system ticking upward, renewable energy.
Across the model there are various roles that people play in systems change (these are in ALL CAPS). For example, STABLISERS who support the declining system giving the new system a chance to emerge, COMPOSTING that identifies what is worth saving from declining systems to take forward into the emerging system, HOSPICING which helps guide dignified closure experiences, and COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE that form connections that grow and strengthen the emerging system.
I like to use this model not just to think of people those in the Social Licence community of practice who are stewarding the growth of new systems, but also to think of community and the roles that they might play in the many sides of transitions.
Coming back to the Hunter community and my PhD research, over the two projects, we engaged over 360 community members through a variety of methods on a plethora of subjects. With them we crafted recommendations for how they want the transition to proceed.
Rather than seeing this community as a block of individuals who met certain demographic criteria, we saw their role as local knowledge holders who have contextually relevant expertise about the places they live and work that is worth hearing and respecting. Viewing community this way meant we structured our participatory methods to draw on their local knowledge, and that helped make our recommendations more robust in place.
In my thesis I described this as “thickening the evidence base for decisions”. There’s a bit more on this model here.
As an idea is proposed it is thickened by knowledge from technical and scientific experts who identify the technoscientific implications of the idea. When local expertise is added to the mix, a greater breadth of contextual knowledge and values are drawn upon to make the idea robust in place. This forms a more solid ground upon which policy frameworks can be built and decisions made.
Wide participation is essential because the information required to make decisions that affect a whole community require a broad understanding of local conditions, governance frameworks, technoscientific implications, social dynamics, environmental conditions, and how solutions might be accepted in a particular location
No single entity can hold all this knowledge, which means the quality of decisions will be compromised if only one stakeholder group is engaged at the exclusion of others.
Action toward energy transitions will therefore be best achieved through place-based initiatives, using participatory methods that embrace local knowledge, pay careful attention to the needs of communities, and allow for meaningful contributions from all stakeholders.
This changes the role of the community from one of objector (Thorpe, 2013) — someone who is always against a proposal — to one who is respected and supported to contribute more to the planning process beyond saying yes or no.
Going back to the Berkana Two Loops model, this positions community organisations like Hunter Renewal (who I worked with) as a community of practice who are making connections to strengthen and grow the emerging system without ignoring what is being left behind. The local knowledge of communities is being drawn upon to make sure that everyone can contribute to this transition.
To finish I’ll share the final set of principles and recommendations that were developed with local and academic experts for the second project I did with Hunter Renewal.
The final report, which you can download from the Hunter Renewal website, contains the Blueprint you see here. It sets out the principles and recommendations that the Hunter folk we engaged see as critical to stewarding the system in decline in a way that allows new, sustainable, and equitable futures to emerge.
I’m incredibly proud of this work and hopeful that it will contribute to the building of a positive energy transition for the Hunter.
Thank you.
REFERENCES
Hunter Jobs Alliance & Hunter Renewal (2021). Future-proofing the Hunter: Voices from our community. https://www.hunterrenewal.org.au/future_proofing_the_hunter
Hunter Renewal. (2023). After the coal rush, the clean up: A community blueprint to restore the Hunter. https://www.hunterrenewal.org.au/restoration_blueprint
Joshi, K. (2020). Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil Free Future. NewSouth Publishing.
Robinson, C. (2019). Hospicing The Old. www.medium.com/thefarewellfund/hospicing-the-old-16e537396c4b
Senecah, S. L. (2004). The Trinity of Voice: The role of practical theory in planning and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental participatory processes. In J. W. Delicath, M.-F. Aepli Elsenbeer, & S. P. Depoe (Eds.), Communication and Public Participation in Environmental Decision-making (pp. 13–33). State University of New York Press.
Thorpe, A. (2013). Public participation in planning: Lessons from the green bans. Environmental and Planning Law Journal, 30(2), 93–105. http://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/PolicyandLegislation/ANewPlanningSystemforNSW/
