Applying Roadmapping and Conceptual Modeling to the Energy Transition: A Local Case Study

The climate crisis requires a global transition toward sustainable practices. In this transition, policy makers face the challenge to take along a wide variety of stakeholders with own interests, needs, and concerns. This research explores the combined use of conceptual models and roadmapping to facilitate understanding, communication, reasoning, and decision-making between a large heterogeneous set of stakeholders. We apply these methods, in the form of action research, in several smaller research projects at a small town in the Netherlands. We find that the combination of conceptual modeling and roadmapping facilitates discussions between heterogeneous stakeholders on complex transition problems, such as the energy transition, at a local scale. However, we see a significant gap in the way of thinking and communicating between experts and decision-makers, which requires additional means to connect them.