“Once upon a time…” Eliciting energy and behaviour change stories using a fairy tale story spine

The International Energy Agency's Demand-Side Management Programme's Task 24 aims to turn behaviour change theory into pilot projects. One obstacle to delivering successful behaviour change interventions concerns the silos between different stakeholders in the energy system and their limited collaboration. To facilitate multi-stakeholder collaboration and co-design of better behavioural interventions and pilots, Task 24 focuses on participatory, shared learning in facilitated workshop settings. Storytelling is used as an overarching 'translation tool' between invited stakeholders from different sectors and research disciplines. A story spine loosely based on a fairy tale structure was used to collect over 160 stories from energy experts from over 20 countries. In this paper, I focus on the process of storytelling using such a story spine, and, to a lesser extent, the participants (the storytellers) and the product (the stories).