Lecture: Deploying Participatory Value Evaluation for Facilitating Effective Participation of Citizens in the Thermal Energy Transition

Lecture by Niek Mouter, Assistant Professor, Infrastructure Policy Appraisal, TU Delft
Hosted by the Urban Energy Institute
Date: Wednesday 4 November 2020
Time: 4-5pm CET
Moderator: Kornelis Blok

To achieve a successful thermal energy transition, it is vital to integrate citizens’ needs in government policies through participatory processes. However, offline participatory approaches can be overly intensive which leads to an overrepresentation of citizens who think that the issue is in their immediate interest. Hence, elected officials often question the extent to which participants’ priorities are a good proxy to represent “the public”. Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) potentially circumvents this by allowing a large and diverse group of citizens to advice their government in an easy-to-access manner. In an online environment, citizens are put into the shoes of a policy maker and see which policy options the government considers while being informed about the impacts. Next, they are asked to provide advice. PVE was originally developed as economic evaluation method, but in this seminar, we discuss how it can could be deployed for effective participation of citizens in the urban energy transition through two real-world experiments.

About the Speaker
My research focuses on improving the appraisal of infrastructure projects and in my work I combine insights from various disciplines such as economics, philosophy, political science and urban planning.
My current work, for instance, focuses on the inclusion of ethical considerations in appraisal models, such as the Cost-Benefit Analysis, and improving the usability of appraisal models for politicians, civil servants and other stakeholders. I (co)developed new appraisal approaches such as ‘willingness to allocate public budget experiments’ and ‘Participatory Value Evaluation.'

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