By: John Reed and Jerome Dion

July 19, 2018

Policymakers and business leaders are issuing calls to accelerate productive investments that address both climate change and societal resource sustainability issues.  Indeed, in the last 40 years there have been significant efforts to improve the nation’s overall energy efficiency and to displace the use of fossil fuels with an array of renewable energy resources.  Laitner, for example, published a chart showing that US GDP has increased 2.65 times since 1980. More critically, 85 percent of the energy required to support an expanded economy has come from greater levels of energy-efficient services.  The remaining 15 percent of the necessary energy services has come from new conventional supply.  In other words, the growth of GDP and energy use growth has largely been decoupled.  As several analysts also document, there is evidence that greater energy productivity has enabled a more vibrant economy. While this is a significant accomplishment, there is also widespread agreement that limiting global temperature increases to 1.5° C by 2050—even as we also achieve greater resource sustainability, increased employment, as well as improved income equality, and improved livelihoods at a global level–will require additional heroic efforts of much greater magnitude and pace.

After thirty plus years working to implement and evaluate government and utility energy efficiency programs, there is a nagging feeling that despite the success of advancing technology, we could have achieved much more if organizational and behavioral impediments to change had been recognized and explicitly addressed. In hindsight, our experience is littered with myriad examples where the inclusion of social dynamics would likely have resulted in more robust outcomes or, in some cases, the avoidance of failure. In our new paper, “Accelerating Sustainability: Integrating Context, Behavior, Technology, and Culture in Organizations,” we advocate for and discuss in detail the explicit application of social change principles and methods to accelerate significant environmental and economic sustainability progress.

In the years before our respective retirements, we had the privilege of working to develop an Institutional Change Program for the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) at the United States Department of Energy. We worked with a terrific group of colleagues, including Amy Wolfe of Oak Ridge National Lab; Rick Diamond and Chris Payne of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Elizabeth Malone and Tom Sanquist of Pacific Northwest National Lab; as well as collaborators Elke Weber of Princeton University and Ruth Greenspan Bell of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  With greatest appreciation we acknowledge the foundation that this team, and all those in Federal government who engaged in the effort, provided for our paper.

Some might ask what is the importance of focusing on institutional change when advancing technology was so successful in reducing energy costs through improved efficiency? On a macro level, the Federal government often struggled to consistently achieve its legislated and Executive Order environmental and energy efficiency goals, despite policies in place, available technologies and alternative means of financing. To focus our inquiry, we asked several fundamental questions:  Were policies missing or inadequate? Were goals too aggressive and/or energy saving opportunities too limited? Were new and better technologies needed? Was implementation constrained by funding availability? Were agencies adequately staffed and organized to achieve goals? We concluded that sufficient policies were in place, identified that opportunities greatly exceeded goal requirements, found that existing and emerging technologies were available, and concluded that any deficits in appropriated funding could be overcome through alternative third-party financing mechanisms. We further concluded that the aspects needing the most attention were organizational structures, behaviors, and cultures.

Multi-disciplinary social science research provided the foundation for the FEMP institutional effort. The goal was to create evidence-based products that agencies could use to create significant and persistent program results. The result was a set of eight change management principles and a conceptual framework to guide context sensitive interventions. Engagement was undertaken with multiple agencies and programs to develop case studies to gain insights into how the principles and framework could be effectively applied. The essence of this works remains available on the FEMP website.

Our paper extends discussion of change management to all organizations, public and private. It expands the discussion of the behavioral science foundations for organizational change principles and the action framework providing numerous examples. It emphasizes the need to not only analyze organizational structure, but also to understand how organizations behave dynamically to facilitate or inhibit change. We believe that all change is ultimately achieved through social change processes. The need to accelerate change to achieve environmental and economic sustainability will depend upon explicit application of those change processes given the specific contexts of organizations and the individuals that inhabit them. We invite colleagues and others to join a renewed and vigorous discussion of what we see as an essential component of achieving sustainability going forward.

John Reed, a sociologist and evaluator, has conducted 100s of studies of energy efficiency and renewable energy over 40 years. Most of the studies, conducted for utilities, state and local governments, and the Federal government, have focused on market analysis and transformation related to commercial buildings, community energy programs, residential energy efficiency — especially low income weatherization, and appliance programs. John can be contacted at jreed@innovologie.com.

Jerome Dion, an urban planner, served in energy program planning and management, policy development, and evaluation and analysis capacities over 33 years in state and federal civil service. He led an integrated building technologies research team designed to develop net-zero energy homes and buildings, and an interdisciplinary team developing institutional change principles and methods to support federal agency energy and environmental policy implementation. Jerry can be reached at jpdion.evolved@gmail.com.