Across Europe, energy sufficiency is steadily gaining recognition as an essential pillar of the clean energy transition. Far from simply consuming less, it invites us to rethink how our needs can be met while reducing energy and resource demand, without compromising quality of life.
The publication of Guide de la Sobriété au Quotidien (Éditions du Rocher, 2025) offered the perfect opportunity to continue this conversation with Marie-Laure Falque Masset, Vice-President for Energy Sufficiency at FEDARENE and Senior Expert at the Paris Region Institute. Drawing on years of experience working with local and regional authorities, her book explores how sufficiency can become part of our everyday lives, while her professional work demonstrates how the same principles can shape local policies and communities.
We spoke with her about the ideas behind the book, the role of local and regional actors in making energy sufficiency a reality, and why the concept deserves a central place on Europe’s climate and energy agenda.
You define sufficiency as a voluntary change in ways of living. How do you keep that definition from being read as purely an individual responsibility, separate from structural and institutional accountability?
My definition operates on two levels at once, individual and collective. At its core, sufficiency is a paradigm, a way of questioning what our essential needs actually are and learning to prioritise them. That is true for a person deciding how to live, and just as true for a town deciding how to organise itself. Local governments building bike lanes or expanding public transit are practising sufficiency just as much as someone at home.
Montpellier’s shared food fund, for example, gives lower income residents access to local, less meat heavy products, is another good example of sufficiency organised collectively rather than left to individual choice alone. So sufficiency was never meant to be reduced to small personal eco gestures, it is a shared responsibility, distributed across scales.
Your book brings together many concrete, practical tips. How did you build this material, mainly from your work with local authorities, from research, fieldwork, or personal experience?
It is a bit of everything, but professional experience is the backbone of it, many of the examples come directly from my work with local authorities. I also drew on the experiences of people I have met along the way, because we are all sober already, in different areas of our lives.
Becoming a parent sharpened this, raising concrete questions about what my children ate, wore, and were washed with. That thinking runs through sections such as the one on household cleaning, which pushes back against an overconsumption that has become almost impossible to avoid today. It led me to a question: do we actually need the end use, or do we need the container?
Industry is starting to ask the same question. The French cosmetics industry federation (FEBEA), has been working on water sufficiency, cutting energy use, and shifting towards refillable products. In the end, the book’s tips are more a synthesis of how sufficiency already shows up, quietly, in many different lives and sectors.
You invite readers to pick freely from your tips. If you had to single out a few as most important, which would you recommend to actually start a genuine sufficiency practice?
If I had to prioritise, I would start with ownership itself. You do not have to own everything outright, renting, sharing, and borrowing should be the default reflex before buying. That points to pooling and mutualising resources rather than each household duplicating what a neighbour already has. The leisure bank in Överkalix is a good example of this.
From there, the next priority concerns what we do buy: choosing things built to last rather than to be thrown away, then actually taking care of them so they wear out and degrade more slowly. With the Directive of June 2024 on common rules promoting the repair of goods, manufacturers across the EU must offer repairs for certain products, even after the two-year legal warranty period has expired and by example make spare parts for refrigeration appliances available for at least 7 years after the product is placed on the market.
Underneath all of it is the same question I keep returning to: what do we actually need? Low tech solutions are often the most honest answer, because they strip things back to their essentials. As an example, to reduce reliance on air conditioning, schools can install ceiling fans and blinds, as well as shade sails in courtyards.
In your book, you draw on economic arguments, health arguments, better air quality, reduced stress, to make sufficiency appealing. Do you see these incentives as the main lever for triggering large scale behavioural change?
These co-benefits matter, and I do think they are worth putting forward: a lighter bill or cleaner air are tangible, immediate reasons for someone to change a habit. But I do not see them as the main lever on their own. What really matters is what they enable, which is putting the individual back at the centre of the decision.
It is the person who questions their own needs, sets their own priorities, and regains control over their own way of living. The economic and health arguments are simply what gets someone through the door. The incentives open the conversation, but the real driver of lasting change is that shift towards personal agency.
Do you think sufficiency practices would take hold more easily if they were instilled from childhood, as cultural norms, rather than introduced later as adjustments?
Any new way of doing things involves giving something up, so the transition is never entirely straightforward, even when the new habit is genuinely better for us. In principle, instilling these reflexes from childhood is an excellent idea, and I would fully support it.
In practice, it is very difficult to put into place: environmental education is almost entirely absent from school curricula in many European countries. So the obstacle is not the idea itself, it is the lack of institutional follow-through.
Do local and regional actors have the skills and resources to implement a genuine territorial strategy for sufficiency?
There is already a solid planning foundation to build on: sufficiency measures appear in European climate plans and in the local plans developed under the EU Covenant of Mayors, and France has its own national sufficiency plans in place. What is missing is not strategy on paper so much as capacity on the ground.
Not every local authority has the in-house expertise to develop and implement sufficiency policies, but this is precisely where local and regional Energy Agencies make a difference. Working closely with municipalities, citizens and local stakeholders, they help translate the concept of energy sufficiency into concrete local action. They design and implement measures that encourage behavioural change, promote shared solutions and reduce energy demand at community level. By embedding sufficiency into local energy and climate strategies, they help ensure that everyone has enough energy to live well while staying within planetary boundaries.
The real shortfall, then, is mostly financial: the expertise and support structures already exist, but funding to deploy them at scale does not always follow. The priority is therefore not to reinvent the strategy, but to properly resource the organisations already helping territories put sufficiency into practice while continuing to share knowledge and expertise across Europe.
If you had to propose three concrete priorities for putting energy sufficiency on the European agenda, what would they be?
The first priority is to rethink the way we build and plan our cities. Energy sufficiency has to be embedded in urban planning from the outset, through bioclimatic architecture, passive design and neighbourhoods designed around walking, cycling and public transport rather than private cars. Barcelona’s Superblocks show that reducing energy demand often starts with redesigning the spaces where people live rather than focusing only on technology.
At the same time, I do not think sufficiency needs an entirely new policy framework. It is already present in many European initiatives, from cohesion policy to renovation programmes and mobility strategies, even if it is not always identified as such. The challenge is to make those connections more visible, integrate sufficiency consistently across existing policies and provide the financial support needed to scale up what is already working.
Finally, Europe also needs a common language around energy sufficiency. The concept is understood differently from one country to another, and the vocabulary can sometimes become a barrier in itself. Developing a shared understanding would make it easier to compare national approaches, strengthen cooperation between territories and build stronger political support. What Europe now needs is to recognise sufficiency as a guiding principle across its policies and give local actors the means to put it into practice.
