Between January 2023 and May 2023, the Scottish Government held a public consultation on its Draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan, providing an opportunity for various stakeholders – including communities, workers, citizens, businesses and other organisations – to engage in the process of designing Scotland’s energy transition. Alma Economics was commissioned by the Scottish Government to analyse and report on the main themes emerging from the consultation responses.

The consultation included 58 open-format questions with free-text fields. In total, 1,598 responses to the consultation were received. All responses were consolidated into a unified database and manually screened for offensive, abusive, or explicitly vulgar content, as well as to identify duplicated responses and coordinated campaigns.

All responses were then read in full by our team of researchers, with thematic analysis of each response conducted to capture the main opinions expressed by respondents in overarching themes, as well as to understand the reasoning behind answers. The most relevant themes for each question were summarised in the final report in order of their prevalence, as measured by the frequency of respondents raising each theme. Throughout the report, supplementary quotes from respondents were included to highlight key themes and viewpoints.

➥ Read our report here