Design Thinking for global energy professionals from emerging economies
Energy leaders from emerging economies, building roadmaps for their own countries
About
Agora Energiewende is one of Europe's most influential independent energy and climate think tanks — founded in 2012, around 100 staff, with offices in Berlin, Brussels and Bangkok and a network of partner think tanks across five continents. It exists to translate climate urgency into politically feasible, science-based strategy that governments and markets actually implement. Its EnerTracks programme equips energy-transition professionals from emerging economies to build real decarbonisation roadmaps for their home countries — not theoretical exercises.
Challenge
Energy-transition professionals in emerging economies work inside hierarchical institutions yet have to build consensus across fragmented stakeholders. They often arrive skeptical of 'Western' methods — design thinking can sound like a Silicon Valley luxury when you're navigating energy poverty and entrenched politics. The task was to make human-centered, collaborative problem-solving feel like a method that respects local complexity — and to send people home with concrete, country-specific roadmaps, not workshop memories.
Solution
Designed the Design Thinking component of the programme and wove it into the core, so every participant tackled a real problem: their own country's energy transition. Combined electricity-system modelling and stakeholder mapping with a human-centered lens — who is this transition for, who gets left behind, how do local stakeholders come to own it. Led the pandemic virtualization, converting an in-person experience into a fully remote format that preserved the collaborative breakthroughs.
Outcome
Running continuously since 2018, EnerTracks has trained 160+ energy-transition professionals from low- and middle-income countries — each leaving with a concrete, country-specific decarbonisation roadmap, and an alumni network that's still building them.
He didn't teach them how to think — he built a method that let them rethink their own countries, and left an alumni network still using it.
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