Lisa Bastås, Innovation and R&D Management

Climate change requires fundamental transformations in how energy is produced and used. While technological developments on the supply side are critical, meaningful progress also depends on everyday decisions citizens make in their homes – whether in consumption patterns or investments in low-carbon technologies. To support such decisions, policy plays a crucial role in accounting for differences in citizens’ motivations, knowledge, resources, and contextual barriers that make individual action difficult. Public energy advising is one key informational policy instrument, in which civil servants contextualize the broad policy mission of reducing environmental impact of energy use by guiding citizens through technological and behavioral measures. However, the effectiveness of this instrument depends not only on its formal design but on how civil servants interpret and contextualize these missions in practice – an aspect that remains insufficiently understood.

This thesis explains how civil servants facilitate sustainable energy transitions when contextualizing policy missions. Conceptualizing them as public intermediaries, it investigates how they enact their mission and contribute to broader ecologies of intermediation. Empirically, it examines Sweden’s public energy advising program through a mixed-methods design combining document analysis, interviews, and surveys.

The findings show that civil servants make sustainable energy transitions tangible for citizens through locally adapted activities, balancing top-down governance with bottom-up needs to build trust and relevance. Their agency enables them to shape systemic conditions, creating interactions, capacities, and knowledge infrastructures through outreach, network-building, and policy feedback – when granted flexibility to do so. Situated within ecologies of intermediation, they complement private actors by offering commercially independent, broad, and context-specific support. Yet current missions emphasize technological measures over behavioral change, limiting the reach of energy advising mainly to homeowners able to invest in new technologies. To ensure just and inclusive energy transitions, policymakers must integrate sufficiency and demand reduction into civil servants’ missions. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that civil servants play a strategic role in empowering citizens and translating policy ambition into everyday action.