Citizen Dialogue Tool for Climate Action for Malmö Stad

Malmö Stad, as part of their climate contract, wanted to engage citizens in a climate dialogue. We carried out research and developed a digital citizen dialogue tool to motivate citizens into actions towards more environmentally friendly behaviour, and to understand what support they require from the municipality to carry out these actions.

One of the major problems related to environmentally friendly behaviour is that even if people understand the importance of needing to reduce their carbon dioxide footprint and are told what they should do, behavioural change is difficult. In addition, individuals tend to reject what is perceived as a power, a pressure, an influence, or any attempt to act upon one’s conduct. As a result, manipulative and alarmistic messages that make people feel fearful, obligated or guilty should be avoided as they are not efficient in creating behavioural change.

We wanted to find a way for Malmö Stad to inspire citizens to be more sustainable in their everyday life and give birth to new processes, values, and social rules. In the form of an app that asks citizens to swipe “yes” or “no” or provide other input, questions are developed together with Malmö Stad using a methodology that grounds the content specifically to the location of Malmö, making it relevant and easy for citizens to participate.

Methodology

The methodology structures and constructs questions in such a way that a two-way dialogue can take place between the stakeholder and citizens (as opposed to like a one-way questionnaire), and provides answers that can be analysed without overwhelming the municipality with an unmanageable volume of quantitative data to process. This dialogue has the potential to empower citizens to change and impact public services (eg. schools, hospitals, public transport), and gives the municipality the opportunity to find out how citizens want to be supported by getting feedback on proposals and initiatives.

Using elements of gamification, the tool incorporates carefully developed questions to explore specific lifestyle aspects, which enables citizens to be clustered. Content will be organised into themes prioritised by Malmö Stad (food at home, consumption, leisure in Malmö, going to work, running and fixing the home), and released gradually as packages of questions over time.

Project team involved: Hayley Ho, Tatjana Apanasevic from Inclusive Systems Innovation unit, Magnus Eriksson from Societal transformation unit, Anton Gustafsson from Connected societies unit, Per Ottoson from Technologies for interaction unit, and Kasper Socha from Human-Automation unit.