Change Needs to Consider all stakeholders for energy transition – Chipungu admonishes at TCI Energy Forum 

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff Writer 

#TurksandCaicos, July 2, 2023 – In its bid to bring clean energy to the country, the Government must take care not to exclude stakeholders, both large and small or the process could end in failure. That was the underpinning message from Farayi Chipungu, Lecturer at Harvard Law School as she delivered her keynote speech on adaptive leadership at the TCI Energy Forum on June 2nd.

While emphasizing the importance of expert communication, she stressed that this transition needed input from all around because of its nature as an adaptive problem.

“Just starting with the nature of the problem, quite often people have either never seen the challenge before or some people can see the challenge and others can’t, so we can’t even agree about the fact that there is a problem in the first place,” she said using climate change as an example.

Despite the obvious effects of climate change, many large companies, and even countries continue to deny the depth of the issue, slowing down work towards a solution.

Chipungu said the implications of these types of complex problems was that the solutions also tended to be murky.

“The work when the challenge is adaptive is not just with experts, because when challenges are adaptive, you can’t take the challenge off people’s shoulders.  The people with the problem tend to be a part of the challenge, but they also tend to be the solution.”

She stressed too that tangible change had to be seen in those affected by the problem, and to do this they had to be involved in the search for a fix.

“You can have all the expertise in the world, but if the people with the problem can’t get involved then the problem is not going to be fixed.”

Another example of an adoptive challenge she says, was COVID-19, where while experts knew what to do to save lives and shared the information, residents had a great burden of responsibility to keep themselves safe and to keep others safe with their own actions.

“A management consulting firm can fly on this island and give you a wonderful 50 page deck on what a clean energy transition could look like— a governor or a minister or a premier can give a directive to say these are the five steps that we need to follow or a CEO can say we need to collaborate more effectively— but of course, you don’t really have a solution until it’s lived in the hearts and minds of all the people up and down the value chain.”

She stressed that while change appears to be difficult, people make changes that they believe are good for them, tending to avoid loss. She encouraged though, that there is some level of loss in every change, and in order to get to the sweet benefits, residents and companies must decide what losses they are willing to absorb.

She had advice for the Government and large companies on how to mitigate this.

“[If] we move in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the loss and pain that people feel then they push back— but if you’re able to acknowledge and see that loss, you can think about how much you can cushion it to make it easier for people.” She continued, “in this change, there will be losses in terms of financial losses, money, jobs, power, there’s going to be all kinds of changes and losses, and in this conversation if we’re not able to talk to those things, then it’s very unlikely that we will be able to achieve any meaningful or sustainable change.”

Anchoring change around the people it affects the most, for example, the residence of the Turks and Caicos, allow those leading the change to not only see aspects of change like speed and the size of investment, much clearer, but to make that change much smoother for both large companies and the small man.