Delivering a culturally-informed behaviour change strategy for heat decarbonisation.
The Challenge
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) faced a challenge in extending their City Heat Decarbonisation Delivery Programme (CDDP) to six new UK cities. While the technical solutions for reducing carbon emissions from heating – the UK’s largest energy use – were advancing, the human element remained a crucial missing piece.
The challenge was clear but complex: how could technical innovations in heat decarbonisation be integrated with genuine behavior change? Success would require not just implementing new technologies, but ensuring these advances resonated with and were adopted by diverse communities across multiple cities. This meant bridging the gap between technical expertise and human experience.
Our Approach
We brought cultural strategy to bear on a government context, combining semiotics, behavioral science, and storytelling to create a uniquely human-centred approach to technical change. More than understanding barriers to adoption, this was about uncovering the cultural codes that could drive meaningful behavioural change.
Our methodology consisted of several integrated components:
- Semiotic research to decode the emerging narratives of heating and its meaning
- Expert interviews to gather deep insights into community needs and motivations
- Cultural mapping of different discourse types against human-based segmentations
- Collaboration with technical experts to ensure alignment between human insights and technical possibilities
Working alongside Ramboll consultancy, we translated these insights into a digital platform that detailed how colour, space, and narrative could create an engaging user experience and tell a compelling story about the journey to zero-carbon heating.
The Outcome
Our work transformed how BEIS approached decarbonisation, embedding behavioural change as a core element of their delivery plans. The impact manifested in several key ways:
- Behavioural change became recognised as a fundamental principle for ensuring the success of technical initiatives
- A sophisticated digital platform that enables cities to monitor and communicate their progress toward zero-carbon heating
- Clear frameworks for understanding how different human groups respond to various decarbonisation narratives
- Tools for creating more empathetic and effective communications about technical change
Perhaps most significantly, this project demonstrated how cultural strategy methodologies traditionally used in commercial contexts can be powerfully applied to government initiatives. By bringing radical thinking to public sector challenges, we helped create a more thoughtful and human-centred approach to technical change.
The success of this work shows how sustainability initiatives can be made more effective by carefully considering the cultural context that frames human behaviour and technical innovation. Through deep cultural understanding and strategic communication, we helped BEIS create a model for sustainable change that doesn’t just focus on technology, but on the people who need to embrace it.
This balance of technical innovation and human activation represents a new approach to sustainable storytelling – one that recognises that the most powerful technical solutions are those that resonate with human experience and motivation.