Engaging citizens in the access economy

The access economy — renting and sharing goods instead of buying and owning them — offers a real alternative to overconsumption. But even where access services already exist, most citizens default to ownership: awareness is low, and trust is fragile. People worry about hygiene, safety, cost, and who is accountable if something goes wrong.

This creates a gap between the services on offer and citizens' willingness to use them. The challenge for ACCESS Hubs is not only to launch more shared and rental services across North-West Europe, but to make them visible, trustworthy, and genuinely appealing to the people they are meant to serve.

We Right Click is developing a citizen engagement toolkit for the public authorities in ACCESS Hubs. The starting point is a co-creation workshop that identifies the barriers and drivers behind citizens' adoption of access services, built around a 90-minute format with four activities that go from ownership vs. sharing attitudes, navigate barriers and trust builders and develop service journeys through real-life access situations.

We Right Click piloted this workshop directly with citizens in Paris. The format is designed to be replicated by the public authorities involved in the project across France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland.

The Paris pilot confirmed that the workshop model works: participants engaged openly with the barrier wall and trust-builder activities, giving We Right Click and the public authorities concrete, real-world input on what stops citizens from using access services, and what would change their minds.

This feeds into two outputs: a replicable citizen engagement toolkit that the other public authorities can use to run their own workshops, and a growing set of additional citizen engagement tools — potentially including games and other formats — that We Right Click will develop over the course of the project to keep raising awareness and driving adoption.