Jacquie Burgess has two main research interests.  First, she specialises in designing and implementing participatory environmental decision-making processes that are both analytically robust and able to support deliberation between specialists, stakeholders and citizens. She and Andy Stirling (SPRU) developed Deliberative Mapping, a participatory multi-criteria risk assessment process which has been used in radioactive waste management for DEFRA and CoRWM. 

Jacquie is Co-Investigator in a Leverhulme Trust funded 4 year project led by Nick Pigeon (Psychology, Cardiff) and Dick Eisner (Psychology, Sheffield) on perceptions of risk in understanding energy futures and climate change.  She is also a CO-I in an 8 university, multidisciplinary consortium led by Peter Pearson (Imperial College) and Geoff |Hammond (Bath University), funded by EPSRC and E.ON, exploring Transition Pathways to a Low Carbon Electricity System by 2050.  Second, Jacquie researches sustainable consumption, partly through action research with the charity Global Action Plan.  GAP works with households, communities, public and private-sector organisations, and schools to facilitate behaviour change. 

She and a post-doc worked on a two year, DEFRA-funded project to evaluate the effectiveness of GAP’s Ecoteam approach which provided empirical evidence to show how durable reductions in energy demand can be achieved with some segments of the population, at least.  Currently, Jacquie is deputy chair of the ESRC’s Strategic Research Board with responsibility for cross-council research on environment, energy and climate change; she sits on the Advisory Group for NESTA’s Big Green Challenge which is offering a prize of £1M to the most innovative and most effective community-based initiative to reduce carbon emissions; and is a member of DEFRA’s National Ecosystem Assessment Expert Group, with responsibility for articulating why contact with nature and living landscapes is important for human well-being.