Discover how the Support service for Citizen-led renovation (CLR) can assist in overcoming long-standing barriers, empowering communities, and accelerating high-quality, affordable upgrades through practical tools and locally driven approaches.
Julien Tami, DG ENER / European Commission | LinkedIn profile
Jan Bormans, Th!nk E | LinkedIn profile
Stavros Spyridakos, Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy | LinkedIn profile
Ervis Sulejmani, Th!nk Europe | LinkedIn profile
Siora Keller, Steinbeis Europa Zentrum | LinkedIn profile
Konstantina Karalaiou, Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy | LinkedIn profile
(Note: Opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union)
Citizen-led renovation (CLR) represents a growing movement within Europe’s efforts to decarbonise the building stock and strengthen citizen participation in the energy transition. It builds on the recognition that large-scale, high-quality renovation requires not only technical and financial instruments but also the active involvement of citizens and communities as agents of change. This approach places citizens, homeowners and local communities at the centre of the process, shifting the focus from fragmented individual actions to coordinated initiatives designed to reduce the burden on building owners. Through community-led structures such as energy communities, one-stop shops and local renovation offices, citizens are supported to plan, finance and implement renovation projects that combine energy efficiency improvements with renewable energy generation.
CLR initiatives contribute to several EU policy priorities, including the Renovation Wave, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), and the European Green Deal’s objective of a fair and inclusive transition. They help address persistent barriers pertaining to operational disruptions, distrust, limitations in reliable information and small, fast-decided renovation measures following impulsive choices that lack an effective plan. The Support service for Citizen-led renovation, established by the European Commission, provides guidance, technical assistance, and capacity-building tools to empower energy communities and local actors to initiate and manage such projects. Experiences across Europe show that citizen-led models can increase project uptake, improve affordability, and generate long-term local socio-economic benefits.
Figure 1. Support service for Citizen-led renovation. Source: https://citizen-led-renovation.ec.europa.eu/select-language?destination=/node/1
This article presents the principles, mechanisms, and enabling conditions underpinning the CLR approach. It also discusses the lessons learned from emerging examples across Member States, highlighting how local authorities and community actors can collaborate to make building renovation more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable. Finally, it introduces the CLR Resource Hub/tool as a practical entry point for actors seeking to initiate or replicate the CLR schemes.
Building renovation lies at the nexus of Europe’s climate objectives, energy security priorities, and social inclusion goals. A large proportion of Europe’s residential buildings were constructed before modern efficiency standards and now require substantial upgrades to meet the targets of climate neutrality, electrification, and reduced dependency on imported fossil fuels. The energy crisis triggered by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine further highlighted the vulnerabilities associated with inefficient homes, underscoring the value of reducing gas consumption through improved thermal performance and clean heating systems.
Despite strong policy drivers, renovation activity remains insufficient, with households facing a combination of financial, technical, administrative and behavioural obstacles. Renovation costs remain a major concern, particularly due to uncertain payback periods and fears of a gap between estimated and achieved energy savings. Homeowners frequently lack the time, technical knowledge, or confidence to compare renovation options, assess contractor credibility, or apply for subsidies and loans. Complex procedures deter participation, while supply-side bottlenecks, such as shortages of skilled labour and long waiting times, limit renovation capacity even when interest is present. Multi-owner buildings often experience additional structural challenges, including collective decision-making constraints and complex legal governance arrangements.
Figure 2. Retrofitting walk organised by the CLR Phase I Pilot Triple SEC, Ireland. Source: https://citizen-led-renovation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-12/Workshop%20summary_CLR_11.11.23%20_Triple%20SEC_Dublin%2C%20Ireland.pdf
These factors underline the need for a transformative approach that strengthens citizen engagement, simplifies processes and improves coordination among local actors. CLR responds to this need by creating supportive ecosystems that allow households to act collectively, receive high-quality guidance and progress through renovation in a structured and transparent manner.
CLR is grounded in a set of principles that ensure renovation projects are technically sound, socially inclusive, and institutionally supported. At its core, the approach recognises that most homeowners require assistance throughout the renovation journey, not only at the moment of investment. CLR prioritises removing administrative and organisational burdens by assigning coordination tasks to trusted intermediaries such as cooperatives, municipalities, and local renovation offices.
Another fundamental principle is the aggregation of renovation demand. By organising groups of homeowners undergoing similar renovation processes, CLR initiators can negotiate more favourable conditions with contractors, streamline workflow planning and create economies of scale. Aggregation also helps reduce waiting times, encourages contractor participation, and reduces uncertainty in project delivery. Renovation projects benefit from collective decision-making and shared learning among participants, which helps overcome behavioural barriers and fosters a sense of community involvement.
Tailored renovation pathways are another cornerstone of CLR. Through the assessment of building characteristics, user needs, and behavioural profiles, citizens receive renovation options that correspond to their motivations, constraints, and long-term goals. This personalisation ensures that deep renovation becomes both technically feasible and socially acceptable. By closely linking renovation with renewable energy deployment and energy community models, CLR further ensures that households can benefit from local energy production, shared services and long-term reductions in energy costs.
The combination of burden alleviation, aggregation, trusted advice, personalisation and local benefit-sharing creates a renovation ecosystem that tackles barriers, strengthens trust, and promotes high-quality outcomes.
The CLR methodology provides a comprehensive way of addressing the barriers that have historically impeded renovation efforts across Europe. Financial constraints are addressed through clearer pathways, cost transparency and collective investment models that improve affordability. The administrative and procedural complexity that typically discourages homeowners is significantly reduced when trusted intermediaries manage key steps, coordinate contractors and support applications for public funding.
Information and trust gaps, widely recognised as a major reason for low renovation uptake, are also addressed through independent technical advice, transparent communication and clearly structured workflows. Citizens receive guidance from actors impartial to specific commercial interests, thereby enhancing credibility and reducing decision-making risk. Supply-side challenges are also alleviated when project pipelines become more predictable and when contractors can rely on grouped renovation demands, which improve efficiency and allow for better planning of labour and materials.
CLR offers a particular advantage in multi-owner buildings, where decision-making can be slow and complex. Through facilitated processes and shared assessments, homeowners receive the support needed to reach consensus and undertake coordinated actions. At the behavioural level, citizen-led approaches make renovation more acceptable by providing reassurance, peer support, and shared momentum. Renovation becomes a community project rather than an isolated and disruptive experience, which helps overcome inertia and fosters long-term engagement. In this way, CLR not only address barriers in isolation but reshapes the entire renovation journey into more accessible, efficient, and socially anchored processes.
A dedicated set of tools developed across the first two phases of the CLR initiative underpins the operationalisation of the approach. These tools form a coherent package, which will soon be available online under the ‘CLR Practice-oriented Handbook’. The ‘Retrofitting Guidelines’ provide technical clarity on renovation measures and their performance implications, supporting households and facilitators in selecting coherent and efficient packages of measures.
Figure 3. Retrofitting Guidelines developed for the Phase II Pilot, Girona, Spain, by CLR. Source: Support service for Citizen-led renovation
The ‘Energy Master Plan’ offers a strategic framework that aligns renovation projects with local energy planning and decarbonisation objectives, helping communities and municipalities understand how individual building upgrades contribute to broader sustainability pathways. The ‘Crowdfunding Financing Scheme’ introduces a participatory funding model that enables citizens to mobilise capital collectively, supporting renovations that might otherwise be constrained by limited access to traditional finance. The ‘Energy Personas’ model introduces a behavioural dimension by segmenting homeowners according to motivations, attitudes and decision-making patterns, ensuring that communication and engagement strategies are adapted to different profiles. The ‘How-to Citizen-Led Renovation Guide’ consolidates methodological knowledge from the CLR experience, presenting a structured set of steps, governance models, and practical guidance for implementing and scaling citizen-led renovation processes in diverse local contexts.
Figure 4. ’How to Citizen-led renovation’ developed by CLR for the CLR Phase I Pilot, Izgrei, Bulgaria. Source: https://citizen-led-renovation.ec.europa.eu/document/download/88a2dc3c-193readinesb-4f7f-8d9f-508d441d6c80_en?filename=How%20to%20Citizen-led%20renova
Experience from the pilot regions demonstrates how the CLR operates under real-world conditions and how its principles translate into measurable progress. The Energent pilot in Ghent, developed during Phase I, illustrates how a trusted cooperative can address the broader system of renovation barriers by combining technical expertise, behavioural insights and community-level facilitation. Homeowners in Ghent faced a familiar mix of information asymmetry, fragmented supply chains, and low confidence in renovation decision-making. Energent responded by integrating behavioural segmentation through the use of energy personas. This allowed the team to understand differences in motivation, concerns and readiness among households. This informed more targeted communication and support strategies, enabling citizens to receive advice tailored to their expectations and perceived risks. The cooperative structured renovation pathways reflected these behavioural profiles and accompanied them with impartial technical assessments and coordinated contractor engagement. By organising homeowners into renovation groups, Energent created transparent and predictable project pipelines, which in turn improved contractor commitment and reduced overall uncertainty. The combination of behavioural insights, trusted facilitation, and aggregated demand demonstrated the effectiveness of a socially attuned and technically coherent community-led approach, ultimately increasing both participation and renovation depth.
Figure 5. Persona guide developed by CLR for the Phase I Pilot Energent. Source: https://citizen-led-renovation.ec.europa.eu/document/download/de92905a-ecab-4a12-801c-103be4f316b9_en?filename=Persona%20Guide.pdf
The Girona pilot, developed under Phase II, shows how a more advanced CLR methodology can take root in a renovation landscape where households typically undertake reactive, small-scale interventions. In Girona, many citizens were unfamiliar with comprehensive renovation planning and renovation decisions were often driven by immediate technical failures rather than strategic considerations. The pilot introduced a structured support mechanism based on the Retrofitting Guidelines and the Energy Master Plan developed under the CLR toolbox. The Retrofitting Guidelines provided a clear technical foundation for identifying coherent retrofitting measures for three specific typologies, enabling households to visualise what deeper renovation might entail. Complementing this, the Energy Master Plan facilitated the contextualisation of individual renovation paths, along with opportunities for energy infrastructure developments and supply options, within the broader energy framework of the area and thus linking household-level decisions with local energy goals and allowing citizens to grasp the long-term value of coordinated action. Renovation facilitators used these tools to guide homeowners through personalised renovation pathways and to articulate the benefits of participating in renovation groups, which improved confidence and helped reduce perceived risks. Early feedback indicated that Girona’s households responded positively to having a clear technical roadmap combined with locally grounded strategic planning.
Figure 6. Energy master plan developed for the Phase II Pilot Girona by the Support Service for Citizen-led renovation. Source: Support service for Citizen-led renovation
The Citizen-Led Renovation Resource Hub has been created as a central access point for the growing body of knowledge that supports community-driven renovation across Europe. It is designed as an open, evolving environment where local authorities, communities, intermediaries and practitioners can find structured guidance, methodological support, and inspiration for developing renovation initiatives that place citizens at the heart of the process. Rather than a static repository, the Hub brings together materials from various sources.
The strength of the Resource Hub lies in its capacity to guide users through the renovation journey by providing accessible explanations of processes, roles, and governance models while offering examples of how different communities have organised themselves to move from initial interest to practical implementation. It presents renovation not as a one-off intervention but as a structured pathway that requires coordination, trust-building, effective communication and a clear distribution of responsibilities.
Figure 7. The Citizen-led Renovation Resource Hub. Source: https://view.genially.com/6784d30c63332263e30340d6
One of the Hub's central functions is to support the replication of successful approaches. By showcasing approaches taken by communities across different regions and contexts, it enables local actors to understand what has worked elsewhere, what challenges were encountered and how processes were adapted to local conditions. This exchange promotes learning across borders and encourages the emergence of renovation models that are both technically robust and socially grounded.
As the initiative advances into its next phase, the Resource Hub will continue to expand as a living reference point for communities and institutions wishing to initiate or scale citizen-led renovation. Its purpose is not to prescribe a single model but to provide the conceptual foundations, practical examples, and knowledge connections that enable local actors to design approaches suited to their needs. In doing so, the Hub reinforces the ambition to make CLR an integral and accessible part of Europe’s broader effort to transform its building stock in a fair, inclusive and community-oriented way.
The next phase of the CLR initiative will focus on consolidating the foundations laid during the first two phases and extending their reach across a wider range of European regions. As renovation becomes increasingly central to the achievement of the EU’s long-term climate, energy, and resilience objectives, Phase III will continue to refine and expand the citizen-centred approach, ensuring that it remains responsive to both policy developments and on-the-ground realities of local communities.
Citizen-led renovation demonstrates that the success of Europe’s renovation agenda depends not only on technical solutions, funding and regulatory requirements, but also on the strength of local engagement, trust and coordinated support structures that enable households to act with confidence. By shifting renovation from an individual and often fragmented effort to a guided, collective process, the approach responds directly to many of the financial, organisational, and behavioural barriers that continue to limit renovation uptake across the continent. The experiences of Ghent and Girona show that when communities are supported through structured processes, meaningful technical guidance and a clear distribution of responsibilities, renovation becomes more accessible, more ambitious, and ultimately more effective.
As Europe moves into a decisive period for implementing the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and meeting long-term climate objectives, CLR provides a pathway that aligns policy ambition with everyday reality. It offers a model in which citizens are not passive recipients of policy but active participants in shaping the energy performance and resilience of their homes and neighbourhoods.
