Empowering intermediaries to train agro-food companies in tackling organizational, cultural and behavioural barriers for energy efficiency measures

To reach countries’ CO2 emission reduction targets, the adoption of emission reduction measures in industry needs to accelerate rapidly. Because of their substantial impact on countries’ CO2 emissions, decarbonization options of energy-intensive industries receive substantial attention in research and policy. Smaller emitters, such as the agro-food industry, receive relatively little attention, although they face many challenges. Cost-effective energy efficiency innovations for these companies are available, but are often not adopted because middle managers lack the resources for identifying innovation opportunities or for persuading higher management of their merits (or both).
The literature on drivers and barriers for the adoption of energy efficiency measures tends to focus on technical and economic barriers for innovation adoption. Similarly, most interventions (i.e., tools, methods, guidelines) to help companies improve energy efficiency, focus on removing these barriers by providing knowledge and insight on technical and economic aspects. While it is acknowledged that organizational, cultural and behavioural factors impact eventual implementation of energy efficiency measures, it is apparently difficult to address drivers and barriers of this nature, both in research and in practice.

Whether interventions sort a lasting behavioural impact in companies strongly depends on the ability of intermediaries (i.e., training companies or energy managers in large firms). Intermediaries are typically very knowledgeable about technical opportunities for energy efficiency and how to identify and implement them, but often lack the skills to make companies actually want to adopt these measures. Expanding their knowledge to non-technical drivers and barriers that impact implementation of energy efficiency measures may increase their impact on the company’s energy efficiency. Thus, approaches aimed at improving current practice by incorporating insights on organizational, cultural and behavioural change, also need to take the role of these intermediaries into account. The interventions should preferably be developed in close cooperation with these intermediaries, and should pay attention to knowledge transfer to these intermediaries.

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Empowering intermediaries to train agro-food companies in tackling organizational, cultural and behavioural barriers for energy efficiency measures

Sectors: Cross cutting, Industry

Country / Region: Global

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

In 1 user collection: Session 1a: Applying behavioural insights in the private sector, organisations and business models

Knowledge Object: Publication / Report

Publishing year: 2020

Author: Suzanne Brunsting, Kevin Broecks, Laurie Hermans, Joachim Globisch, Tim Hettesheimer, Antoine Durand, Gema Millan Ballesteros, Clara Lorente Almenara

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