Timothy Peter Marcroft

Field of work

My Background: I hold a bachelor's degree in social psychology and French studies from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA and a master’s degree in the social and solidarity economy, studying associations, cooperatives, and mutual organizations from the Université Lyon 2 Lumière in France. As a part of that program, I joined the COMETS, an EU-funded project working on citizen engagement in the Energy transition and specifically a working group based at HVL. After finishing my master’s degree, I continued to work with the COMETS project for two years before moving on to a PhD in the RESINNREG program at HVL beginning in July 2022. Aside from my academic background, I also have practical experience in management and strategy in non-profit and community organizations.

My main field of work at the Department of Environemntal Sciences: I am researching co-creation in the energy transition at the territorial scale, primarily in France and Norway, with an interest developing transferrable knowledge and practices internationally. Through my PhD project, I seek to better understand the territorial dynamics of citizen, civil society, and stakeholder engagement in the energy transition and hope to develop analytic and strategic tools for use by public actors to help increase this engagement. I hope to develop a territorial analysis and strategic planning methodology applicable to both France and Norway which can allow public actors to increase general mobilization toward the energy transition. Throughout my PhD, I will be working in concert with an intermunicipal government in France to help them study the issue of citizen engagement, and I plan to bring in Norwegian regional government actors to further generalize the research to that context. Though I am based in central France, near the city of Clermont-Ferrand, my work takes me frequently to Norway and I also plan to include a research stay in Northern Italy as a part of my PhD.