Changing the Game

For the two first afternoons of the summit, the participants grappled with a complex political strategy game developed by Energy Crossroads. The purpose was to get an understanding of the difficult processes going on when politicians try to work out a sustainable energy plan for the future. The goal was to work out an energy plan that can serve as inspiration for the politicians in the countries the participants come from - a solution for future energy challenges. The participants definitely succeeded in obtaining the goal, although it was a difficult process.

On the first day of the game the participants were divided into four regions: Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe. Each region looked at the present composition of energy sources for their region and created a ‘Dream Tower’ of how they would like the composition to be in 2030. This dream tower was build out of LEGO® blocks, where each block represented energy sources such as gas, coal, wind etc. When building their Dream Tower, however, they had to take into consideration the technical limitations and relative costs of the different solutions.

After they built their dream towers, they chose a path to fulfilling their vision by sorting and paying for the implementation of policies, mostly by taking out a loan. Policies were represented on cards – one card per policy – and the groups were required to collaborate and agree with each other on which policies to play, or not play. The available policies were diverse, from behavioural options such as “Live where you work” to “develop more efficient electric motors.” This is where it got tricky. They had to make some choices and every choice could shut out other choices because of economic or technical limitations. This led many of the groups to much heart-felt discussion. The next step was to reconstruct their Dream Tower of 2030 into a tower that recognised their technical and economic limitations, relative to the policies they had chosen.

On the second day of the game, things became more difficult as the four regions had to present their local plans and then agree on a united plan for all of Europe. This was particular difficult because not only had the groups chosen different paths on how to deal with the energy challenges, they also had to consider special needs for every region. For example, Southern Europe would benefit of installing solar power plants, but this might not go so well in cloudy Northern Europe.

So that the separate regions could begin to negotiate a central agreement, each region first chose and prioritized eight policies out of the approximately twenty they chose on day one. Then, when the regions met, any policies that had been chosen by two or more regions were left as only one policy choice up for negotiation. This meant the regions had to reach a consensus on the most favourably policies to pursue. Out of the approximately twenty policies left, they could only choose between 8 and 12 for the entire European region.

The subsequent negotiations were very interesting to follow. The participants were thrown into a ‘fish bowl’ negotiation, where one representative from each region sat face-to-face with the other regions and fought for their chosen policy. Everyone else had to be quiet. Sometimes this was too much too ask. The person in the hot seat changed for each policy until a total of eight was reached. Consensus or majority? Choose this policy or leave it out, because there was a better one to choose later? Often the discussions started off new dilemmas and the debate quickly became heated. As more and more policies were chosen, and the field narrowed for the final choices, tactics became more important. Fervent whispering, hand signs and hurried group v group discussions before a policy was chosen for the next round influenced many of the decisions – not unlike a real negotiation.

As CSS have been much discussed during the summit, it was interesting to observe that the solution seemed unpopular among the participants. Very few chose this solution, even though some of them reluctant realized that it would be difficult to reach the goals without it.

When they finally agreed on which policies to pursue, everyone was split into non-regional groups. Each group was arbitrarily assigned two or three of the successful policies from the negotiation round and asked to both identify stakeholders and think up practical ways in which their policies could be implemented. Each thought was scribbled into booklets. At the end of the day, each group had a workable plan for their policies that could be used to push politicians into make the necessary changes to reach the goal for a cleaner and sustainable energy future. As a final demonstration of solidarity, the participants put their signature on the finished result, which will be posted on the our-opportuntiy.com website and sent to key energy stakeholders in Europe.

Written with substantial help from Michael Chapman.