Session 2. 7.

Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a small city that has witnessed significant social, economic, and environmental changes. Energy systems, too, have been transformed, shaped by environmental injustices, community resistance, and disinvestment. Within this context, the Holyoke Community Energy Project emerged as an open platform, inviting local residents to build shared knowledge about energy systems and explore pathways to a decarbonized future.
The four-year project offers a space for community members, many of whom have historically been excluded from energy-related decision-making, to engage, share experiences, and voice their needs for a just energy transition. Funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this project is a partnership between the UMass Amherst Energy Transition Institute (ETI), Neighbor to Neighbor Holyoke, and OneHolyoke Community Development Corporation (CDC). The goal is to ensure the benefits of this transition are accessible to all.
In the spring of 2024, the team recruited the first cohort of Energy Justice Leaders. From April to October, these leaders gathered monthly for workshops covering topics like personal and community energy use, the relationship between health and wellbeing with energy access and quality, efficient and less polluting technologies, and community-driven energy solutions. They also delved into the history of energy systems and activism in Holyoke.
Using anthropological research methods, the Energy Justice Leaders strengthen their collective knowledge about the challenges of the energy transition and the potential of collective actions to address them. This presentation will share an overview of the journey and engage attendees in one of the Energy Justice Leaders activities that was intended to support them in envisioning a just energy transition in Holyoke. Attendees will be asked to consider and arrange energy transition action cards on different scales (e.g., individual to collective benefits) in a facilitated discussion. The activity ends with a conversation on concrete next steps associated with each action.

Research highlights trust's role in collective behavior, particularly within contemporary social dilemmas involving climate change and public health crises. Previous studies show that an organization's actions can shape how customers perceive it as socially responsible and trustworthy. Yet, our understanding of how organizational behavior influences customers' active participation in prosocial behavior remains limited. Through an online vignette experiment, this study examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior signaling, trust in one’s electric utility, and collective action. I operationalize collective action as willingness to tolerate discomfort, shift appliance usage, and increase the temperature above normal daily comfort during an extreme heatwave. Preliminary results from SEM modeling suggest that both pro-social and pro-environmental CSR signaling enhance perceptions of trustworthiness across all three measures of collective action. However, this does not always translate to an increased likelihood of individuals engaging in collective action. I find that pro-social CSR signaling indirectly boosts all three measures of collective action, while pro-environmental CSR signaling shows no effect. Lastly, I find no evidence that high-fit CSR signaling (behavior closely aligned with corporate functions) impacts collective action more than low-fit CSR signaling. This research increases our understanding of how specific CSR signals influence trust and collective action, offering insights for organizations aiming to foster prosocial responses to pressing issues like climate change.

Keywords: Trustworthiness, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Dilemmas, Energy Conservation, Extreme Heat

This study tracks the evolution of public electricity governance in Ontario by applying energy commoning as an analytical framework. An energy commoning framework, built on the principles of collective governance, universal access, and social justice, allowed for exploring the interrelationship between community, state, and corporate actors pertaining to control, ownership, and benefits of electricity development in the province. Findings show that the establishment of public power ownership in Ontario at the turn of the twentieth century was achieved through a partnership with municipal/community actors at the expense of corporate control over electricity supply, opening spaces for energy commoning and widespread access to affordable electricity. In contrast, since the 1950s, the centralization of provincial control over electricity infrastructure and generation in the province went hand-in-hand with intensified corporatization of ownership and control, eventually resulting in the privatization of the provincial utility corporation Hydro One in 2017. This corporate-public nexus continually attempted to weaken the critical elements of energy commoning for intensified commodification. The presentation concludes with a discussion on building public community alliances to open spaces for energy commoning and reflections on applying energy commoning as a public policy analysis framework.