Sustainability and coherence of actions aimed at behavioral change in energy consumption

This research focuses on changes in energy practices and, more generally, on the changes in lifestyles expected as part of the ecological and energy transitions, by questioning the conditions for their sustainability. Based on an experiment carried out in 2013-2014 on a French territory and on new experiments on a territorial scale, we propose to explore two problematic axes. The first axis concerns the temporalities of change. We questioned the maintenance in time of the changes and adjustments observed three years earlier in volunteer households to test various forms of support and information regarding energy consumption. We were also interested in the possible delayed effects in the medium and long term not observed during the surveys conducted in 2013-2014. The second axis concerns the evaluation of the data we sent in these voluntary households and on a new sample.

The research is multidisciplinary, involving psychology, sociology and engineering sciences, and closely associates the territory, which took part in the construction of the devices, deployed in the experimental phase and in their evaluation. The approach combines a qualitative methodology through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with a psychological questionnaire approach.