Nourian Peters, Annemiek de Looze, Sander ten Caat, Aarthi Sundaram & Geertje Bekebrede
Published as part of the conference proceedings of the 54th ISAGA Conference, July 2023
Designing local energy transitions is becoming an important question for local governments all around Europe. Negative perceived impacts of energy projects on local communities have frequently sparked opposition. Citizen resistance is often fed by feelings of recognition, distributive or procedural injustice. To give policymakers insight into these, (hidden) injustices, we designed the “Just Solar Panels” serious game. The game aims to make players experience how it feels to be participating in a participatory process from the perspective of different archetypes. The player are expected to balance daily personal tasks, needed to stay happy with processing and acting upon municipal information in a limited amount of time. The stated aim is to maximise points that represent general wellbeing The roles and tasks are designed in a way that are unfair in a non-obvious way. This mimics reality where citizens with the same information and opportunities to participate may not be able to do so because of systemic injustices.
The game was played in three sessions with students, academics and industry and policy experts. The debrief was focused on eliciting experienced inequalities between players in the game and relating these to reality. The game successfully allowed players to experience injustices and relate these to reality, increasing their understanding of how seemingly just participatory processes can be unjust. In the future, the game should be further developed to enhance its use as a tool for learning and building capacity for change in organizations towards a more just local energy transition.
