One objective of the EU Reformers project is citizens engagement. But there are many well-intentioned actions by volunteers or civil servants working on the energy transition, with the result that enthusiastic people who were already planning to take measures participate, but that a larger part of the silent majority feels threatened, drops out and votes for extreme parties. Those parties then break sustainability with national regulations and laws. So what does engagement mean for sustainability in the long term. Various forces in the media play a role, how new techniques are chosen and the way in which people communicate with each other through forms of propaganda. These aspects of the energy transition are discussed based on basic literature but also from winners of the Nobel Prize for 2024 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson. The energy transition is pre-eminently a collective issue that affects every citizen and in certain situations lends itself to deliberative democracy as a supplement to representative democracy. This paper is a first attempt to bridge the gap between this Nobel Prize winners and the approach to energy transition, with engagement and participation as a solution with for example a citizens assembly on energy embedded in representative democracy.
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