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Addressing the Climate
Crisis
Local action in theory and
practice
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Addressing the Climate Crisis
“We shall not get to Net Zero without local action and Local and Regional
Authority participation. This book shows how real subsidiarity works and how
important it is. It’s a clarion call to a Government which still hasn’t made local
government its partner in the battle against climate change. These are lessons to
be learned at every level and their positive story gives us all renewed hope.”
—The Rt Hon John Gummer, Lord Deben, Chairman of the Committee on
Climate Change
“Local communities have emerged as influential drivers of action against climate
change and important sources of institutional and behavioural innovation. This
powerful book, written by a new generation of climate experts, provides a
thoughtful introduction into the theory and practice of place-based climate
action.”
—Professor Sam Fankhauser, Professor of Climate Change Economics and Policy,
University of Oxford and Research Director, Oxford Martin Initiative on a
Net-Zero Recovery
“What does it mean to deliver place-based climate action, and how can we make
that possible? Making a deliberate effort to engage with the complexity of climate
action and the contradictions of place-based initiatives, this book points towards
the potential for a new, more just, politics of climate change: a politics that puts
people’s voices at its center.”
—Professor Vanesa Castan Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism, University of
Sheffield and a lead author for the IPCC Working group II on Impacts,
Adaptation and Vulnerability
“There is real urgency to tackle the climate crisis and local action is playing
a critical role in this. This book provides a rich set of contributions on the
theoretical and practical applications of climate action which make an important
contribution to the debate on what it means to deliver and assess action on
climate change on the ground.”
—Miatta Fahnbulleh, Chief Executive, New Economics Foundation
Candice Howarth ·Matthew Lane ·
Amanda Slevin
Editors
Addressing
the Climate Crisis
Local action in theory and practice
Editors
Candice Howarth
Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment
London School of Economics and
Political Science
London, UK
Amanda Slevin
School of History, Anthropology,
Philosophy and Politics
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, UK
Matthew Lane
School of Geosciences
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-79738-6 ISBN 978-3-030-79739-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79739-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access
publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
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general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
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Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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Acknowledgments
The editors would like to extend their thanks to the Place-Based Climate
Action Network (P-CAN) (Ref. ES/S008381/1), funded by the UK
Economic and Social Research Council, for supporting this work. Further
details of PCAN activities and people can be found at https://pcancities.
org.uk/.
The authors of Chapter 3extend their thanks to Jonny Gordon-
Farleigh and David Bollier.
The authors of Chapter 4thank the participants and members of Envi-
rolution who supported this research with necessary data, knowledge
and expertise about their ongoing community education, empowerment
and mobilisation project. The award-winning impact assessment report is
part of the Collaboration Labs programme at the University of Manch-
ester, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Training
and coaching support for the research team was supplied by Code Switch
Consultants, Future Everything and Inkling Training.
The authors of Chapter 12 would like to acknowledge the diverse
stakeholders, project teams and interviewees involved in both projects that
frame the reflections for this chapter.
v
Addressing the Climate Crisis: Local
Climate Action in Theory Practice:
Editorial
Climate breakdown, extensive biodiversity loss and deepening inequali-
ties—these pressing socio-ecological challenges have profound ramifica-
tions for societies, communities and individuals. Inherent to such crises
are intersecting socio-economic, ecological and political impacts, which
affect people differently and we know that climate breakdown dispropor-
tionately affects those with the least resources to adapt, locally and glob-
ally (HM Government, 2017). Rather than dwelling on the causes and
consequences of unsustainable societal pathways driving socio-ecological
adversities, clearly articulated by WMO (2020), IPBES (2019), IPCC
(2018), among others, this book offers hope, inspiration and analyses for
multi-level climate action, spanning varied communities, places, spaces,
agents and disciplines.
At a macro-level, many governments and local authorities have declared
a Climate and Ecological Emergency, including the UK (May 2019),
Ireland (May 2019), Northern Ireland Assembly (February 2020); by
the end of 2020, 79% of District, County, Unitary and Metropolitan
Councils in the UK had declared a Climate Emergency (PCAN, 2021).
Alongside such declarations, evolving policy frameworks seek to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), limit climate change impacts and
prepare societies for inevitable consequences of climate breakdown.
Clear policy signals by international organisations and national govern-
ments remain essential; however, important decisions are increasingly
vii
viii ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN …
being made beyond this, and beyond state actors, fostering opportu-
nities for climate action within localities. For example, decisions about
low-carbon business opportunities, renewable energy investment, urban
transport, energy management, buildings efficiency and the management
of climate risks.
It is increasingly recognised that the delivery of climate policy ulti-
mately happens through place-based initiatives at the local level (Galarraga
et al., 2011; Howarth et al., 2021), and it has been widely argued that
effective delivery of actions to promote low-carbon and climate-resilient
development will require experiments with new governance arrange-
ments (Bulkeley et al., 2019; Castán Broto, 2020; Jordan et al., 2018;
Kivimaa et al., 2017). In particular, processes that engage and harness the
combined energies of public, private and third sectors (Gouldson et al.,
2016) are required.
The Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN), funded by the UK
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), is focused on trans-
lating climate policy into action ‘on the ground’ in communities. It does
this mainly through its three core City Commissions in Belfast, Edin-
burgh and Leeds (and growing outer network of city commissions), and
two thematic platforms looking at sustainable finance and adaptation and
resilience, underpinned by business engagement. PCAN collaborated with
the Royal Geographical Society’s Climate Change Research Group to host
a half-day virtual mini conference in September 2020 bringing together
international scholars and practitioners working on a range of topics
relating to local climate praxis and to discuss the challenges bridging
climate theory and practice within place-based climate action.
This book is a result of that mini conference and focuses on applied
research exploring the translation of climate policy into action; innova-
tive forms of engagement and citizen participation at the local level and
their role in overcoming limited capacity to deliver climate action across
different governance levels; diverse forms of ‘community’ that come to
engage with climate action at different scales; critical perspectives on what
‘place’ means for shaping our response to climate change on different
scales; and whether the local context hinders or enhances progress on
climate resilience and decarbonisation. We explore these important and
pertinent issues to addressing the climate crisis through local climate
action with a collection of twelve chapters grouped into three parts:
Community and place in local climate action, Spaces of climate action
and Agents of local climate action.
ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN … ix
Interconnected yet conceptually distinct, the three parts span multiple
levels of analysis, interrogating diverse perspectives and practices inherent
to the vivid tapestry of climate action emerging locally, nationally and
internationally. Setting the scene, Part I illuminates the complexity and
value of ‘community’ and ‘place’ as a locus for bottom-up approaches
to citizen participation in climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience
endeavours. Shifting towards meso- and macro-levels of organisations,
cities and counties, Part II examines different spaces for local climate
action created and/or supported by local authorities. Part III offers
insights into key agents of local climate action, demonstrating, on one
hand, the centrality of communication and citizen engagement for climate
action, and on the other, the important roles played by the private sector
and universities.
Community and Place in Local Climate Action
When we consider translating climate action into action in communities,
we are immediately faced with the basic task of constituting community
and place as a starting point for action. ‘Community’ tends to be seen
as the embodiment of activity that occurs in the sometimes-hazy space
between the micro-level of individuals and families, and the macro of
cities, counties and countries. It can be a catchall term for all sorts of
collective activity within civil society yet, conversely, be used to distinguish
people as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, excluding those who do not explic-
itly share bonds at the core of different configurations of community.
Similarly, ‘place’ as a geographical and visceral underpinning for different
forms of collective organisation can be levied as subjective or exclusionary.
Grappling with conceptual and practical challenges (and opportunities)
of community and place, Part I brings crucial elements of local climate
action to the fore and offers reflections and shared learning as a basis for
impactful climate action that emerges at grassroots level, as opposed to
top-down approaches mandated in climate policy.
In Chapter 1, Slevin et al. pose the important question of how do we
enable a genuinely inclusive, just transition to low carbon, healthier and
fairer communities and societies, particularly in Northern Ireland where
legacies of prolonged ethno-nationalist conflict are expressed in physical,
cultural and socio-economic divisions. The authors elucidate the poten-
tial of community climate action, influenced by Freirean praxis, to tackle
xADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN …
injustices, aid peace building and enable a just transition from the bottom-
up, when undertaken with and in diverse communities. Concentrating on
‘place’, in Chapter 2Murtagh and Lane explore how the concept is under-
stood by place-based climate adaptation projects in Scotland and argue
that place is an important, albeit complex and value-laden, mobiliser for
collective climate action at a local scale.
Taking a novel approach to collective climate action, in Chapter 3
Stone et al. draw on the work of Elinor Ostrom to situate ‘common-
ing’ as an invitation for people to actively participate in the transition
to a green economy and society. From their perspective, a Commoners’
climate movement involves people claiming, creating and stewarding the
infrastructure of a net-zero world through action at multiple scales with
multi-level partnerships. In Chapter 4, Walley et al. present innovative
empirical data to expound the influence of Freirean critical theory on
Envirolution, a Manchester-based volunteer-led cooperative that organ-
ises community engagement festivals to raise awareness and inspire action
upon the climate emergency.
Combining theory and practice, reflection and action, a consistent
thread throughout Part I is the opportunity to engage with understand-
ings of praxis as ‘transformation of the world’ (Freire, 1996), as a basis
for socio-ecological action to aid a just transition to healthier, fairer and
more sustainable societies (Slevin et al., 2020), beginning in and with
communities and places.
The Spaces of Climate Action
The ‘local’ scale has been thrust into the spotlight when it comes to taking
action against climate change. Inertia at national and global scales trans-
lates into increasing expectation that the local scale can step up and fill
the void. But what is the local scale? What spaces are we referring to
when we talk about local climate action? And are we primarily looking
for this scale to provide us with the resources to combat this otherwise
global problem? Or does the local scale offer us a more tangible space
with which to appreciate the impacts of climate change and thus re-think
how this environmental crisis could (and should) be reshaping our rela-
tionship with our nearest neighbours? In Part II of the book, we focus
our attention on the spaces of local climate action and draw together four
important contributions to thinking about the question of ‘where’ local
climate action comes from.
ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN … xi
Connecting together three of the four chapters is the fascinating ques-
tion of how the required reductions in global CO2emissions have now
trickled down to the local scale and the institutional, practical and ethical
challenges that this throws up. In Chapter 5, Dyson and Harvey-Scholes
offer valuable insight into a phenomenon that swept the United Kingdom,
and indeed the world, during 2019—the declaration of a climate emer-
gency by local governments. Whilst the emergency rhetoric conveys a
sense of real urgency to act, the authors assess the extent to which local
authorities have displayed the requisite ambition in terms of follow-up
action and how this fits with existing institutional capacities. Before even
getting to the question of how such emission reduction strategies for the
local scale can be developed, however, in Chapter 6, Russell and Christie
offer fascinating insight into the challenges involved with simply estab-
lishing carbon emission baselines at the scale of local jurisdictions. Then,
in Chapter 7, Harvey-Crawford and Creasy provide a candid and powerful
set of reflections on the risks associated with granting special privilege to
emission reductions as the single most important aim for climate action
at the local level.
In addition to demonstrating the extent to which climate action is
already well underway at the local scale, together, these chapters power-
fully illustrate the interwoven and interdependent nature of the local,
national and global scales. Questions of local enablement by national
government; coordination of neighbouring geographies; and geograph-
ically distributed climate justice loom large. Offering a timely non-
anglophone perspective, then, Chapter 8from Haupt, Eckersely and Kern
situates some of these debates not only in a different geographical context,
but in a more historical register. Through their analysis, they illustrate how
the otherwise ‘ordinary’ German cities of Gottingen and Remscheid have
been actively cultivating a progressive approach to climate action since
the early 1990s. The author’s chapter serves as a poignant reminder that
inspiration for how to deliver action on climate change need not merely
come from those parts of the world deemed to be most pioneering by
contemporary mainstream narratives.
The Agents of Local Climate Action
A core element of local climate governance rests on the different players
that help shape it and those that will have to work alongside core climate
policies in order to galvanise change and sustain ambition at the local
xii ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN …
level. In particular, questions such as whose role is it to drive local climate
action? How are producers and users of scientific knowledge working to
inform local action? And what innovative processes of engagement exist
to ensure the voices and needs of different stakeholders are heard and
incorporated into local climate action? The third, and final part of this
book brings together four chapters that look at some of the key agents
in local climate action and some of the innovative forms in which these
agents interact with each other.
The four chapters in this final part provide a rich set of critical perspec-
tives on core agents instrumental in leveraging and driving action on
climate change. We begin with a broader perspective, with a focus on
climate adaptation, where in Chapter 9Guida and Howarth investigate
how communication of climate knowledge to providers of climate change
advice and support must consider the salience, credibility and legitimacy
of such knowledge to align with the needs of different end users or agents
of local climate action. In Chapter 10, Connell and Lane then explore
how the private sector can benefit the work of city climate commissions
by presenting a framework to better capture the diverse and varying set
of competitive and economic motivators for private sector organisations
to take action against climate change. In Chapter 11, Wells provides an
account of citizen juries and assemblies on climate change to critically
reflect on the extent to which they, as a process for democratic delib-
eration, credibly and legitimately engage the public on climate change.
Finally, in Chapter 12, Robinson, Catney, Calver and Peacock explore
the concept of the living lab in a university setting and their multiple
roles to catalyse change locally through education, research and business
engagement.
We see in this concluding part of the book, not only the wide range
of agents involved in climate action, but their diversity and the benefits
and complexities this brings to addressing the climate crisis through local
action. This is explored through the lenses of climate adaptation and miti-
gation as well as innovative forms of agent collaboration, communication
and engagement. In doing so, this part emphasises the core questions
around how to most effectively represent and capture the needs, values
ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS: LOCAL CLIMATE ACTION IN … xiii
and capacities of local agents to contribute to a broader, yet effective, set
of impactful and inclusive climate actions.
Candice Howarth
Matthew Lane
Amanda Slevin
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Contents
Addressing the Climate Crisis: Local Climate Action in
Theory Practice: Editorial vii
Part I Community and Place in Local Climate Praxis
1 Local Climate Praxis in Practice: Community Climate
Action in Belfast 3
Amanda Slevin, John Barry, Teresa Hill, James Orr,
Pauline O’Flynn, Lynda Sullivan, and Richard McLernon
2 Putting the ‘Place’ in Place-Based Climate Action:
Insights from Climate Adaptation Initiatives Across
Scotland 15
Ellie Murtagh and Matthew Lane
3 A Commoners’ Climate Movement 27
Lucy Stone, Gustavo Montes de Oca, and Ian Christie
4 The Envirolution Revolution: Raising Awareness
of Climate Change Creatively Through Free
and Accessible Community Engagement Festivals 39
Bob Walley, Ami Crowther, Paloma Yáñez Serrano,
Abderrahim Nekkache, Rui Cepeda,
Debapriya Chakrabarti, and Eugene Boadu
xv
xvi CONTENTS
Part II The Spaces of Local Climate Action
5 How Have Climate Emergency Declarations Helped
Local Government Action to Decarbonise? 51
James Dyson and Calum Harvey-Scholes
6 Developing a Carbon Baseline to Support
Multi-Stakeholder, Multi-Level Climate Governance
at County Level 63
Erica Russell and Ian Christie
7 Power in Practice: Reflecting on the First year
of the Edinburgh Climate Commission 73
Rosanna Harvey-Crawford and Alice Creasy
8 How Can ‘Ordinary’ Cities Become Climate Pioneers? 83
Wolfgang Haupt, Peter Eckersley, and Kristine Kern
Part III The Agents of Local Climate Action
9 Effective Communication on Local Adaptation:
Considerations for Providers of Climate Change
Advice and Support 95
Kristen Guida and Candice Howarth
10 Diversifying the Private Sector in Local Climate
Commissions 107
Robert Connell and Matthew Lane
11 Citizens’ Assemblies and Juries on Climate Change:
Lessons from Their Use in Practice 119
Rebecca Wells
12 Universities as Living Labs for Climate Praxis 129
Zoe P. Robinson, Philip Catney, Philippa Calver,
and Adam Peacock
Index 141
Notes on Contributors
John Barry is a father, a recovering politician and Professor of Green
Political Economy and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainability,
Equality and Climate Action at Queen’s University Belfast. He is also
co-chair of the Belfast Climate Commission.
Eugene Boadu is a Ph.D. Researcher in Management at Keele Univer-
sity. His research focuses on strategies for mitigating and adapting to
climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, and the role played by multinational
enterprise subsidiaries.
Philippa Calver is a Ph.D. Researcher with the Tyndall Centre for
Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and a Teaching
Fellow at the University of Salford. Her research explores aspects of justice
within the transition to a low carbon future.
Philip Catney is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Keele University. He
specialises in environmental and urban public policy and has published
extensively in journals such as the Journal of Environmental Policy
and Planning,Environment and Planning C,Town Planning Review,
Environmental Hazards,Journal of Environmental Management, among
others.
Rui Cepeda is a Ph.D. Researcher in Arts and Cultural Management,
University of Manchester. His research focuses on the managerial and
mediating processes used in the production of socially engaged art
xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
projects and its after-life, the documentation of those artistic projects.
He has conducted ethnographic research examining the problems and
conflicts affecting particular communities.
Debapriya Chakrabarti is a Ph.D. Researcher in Architecture and
Urban Studies, University of Manchester. Her research investigates
everyday practices and socio-spatial transformation of household-based
crafts industry in an informal community due to shifting governance
policies. She has conducted ethnographic and participatory research of
studying lives and livelihoods of marginalised communities affected by
disjointed infrastructures.
Ian Christie is Senior Lecturer in the social science of sustainable devel-
opment in the University of Surrey’s Centre for Environment and Sustain-
ability. He is a member of the Surrey Climate Commission and a Fellow
of WWF-UK. He is a co-investigator in the University’s Centre for
Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP, www.cusp.ac.uk).
Robert Connell while completing his M.A. International Business and
Languages (German) at Heriot-Watt University, founded the universi-
ty’s Sustainability Society. Following this, Robert studied M.Sc. Carbon
Management at the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on the
topic of how the engage the private sector in taking greater action on
climate change.
Alice Creasy is a Research Assistant at the Edinburgh Climate Change
Institute focusing on issue of urban environmental governance. Alongside
her work at the ECCI, she is a Policy and Membership Officer for the
Local Government Information Unit and is a co-founder of the Embra
Collective, an intersectional feminist collective that focuses on issues of
climate change and sustainability. Alice has a first-class degree in Geog-
raphy from the University of Glasgow and has a Masters in Environmental
Sustainability (Distinction) from the University of Edinburgh.
Ami Crowther is a Ph.D. Researcher in Human Geography, School of
Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester.
Her research focuses on low-carbon urban energy transitions, considering
the actors, institutions and infrastructures associated with these processes
and the interrelations between these entities.
James Dyson completed an M.Sc. in Environmental Policy and Regu-
lation at LSE in September 2020, during which he investigated climate
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
action in Manchester and gained a role as Research Assistant to Dr.
Candice Howarth at ESRC-funded PCAN. Currently, James works as an
environmental consultant for Ricardo and manages Editors for Impact
CIC.
Peter Eckersley researches local climate governance, central-local
government relations, public policy and accountability at the Leibniz
Institute for Research on Society and Space in Germany, and at
Nottingham Trent University, UK. Before entering academia, he spent
ten years advising English municipalities on policy and management.
Kristen Guida is manager of the London Climate Change Partnership,
after ten years at Climate South East, where she held the posts of Program
Assistant and Coordinator/Director. In 2011, she co-founded Climate
UK and chaired its Board of Directors until 2016. Her main interests
are in supporting adaptive capacity, helping organisations formulate and
share effective responses to the challenges presented by climate change,
and bridging the gap between scientific evidence and action.
Rosanna Harvey-Crawford is a Project Officer at the Edinburgh
Climate Change Institute. She is the coordinator for the Place-based
Climate Action Network and the research group Research and Climate
Action at the Local Level. She co-founded an intersectional feminist
collective, Embra Collective, in 2020. She has a degree in French & Soci-
ology from the University of Warwick and a Masters in Environment &
Development from the University of Edinburgh.
Calum Harvey-Scholes is a Research Fellow in the Energy Policy
Group at the University of Exeter specialising in local government, and
community ownership and enterprise. He has a background in climate
campaigning and is a trustee at Stay Grounded and the UKYCC.
Wolfgang Haupt has a background in Geography and holds a Ph.D.
in Urban Studies from Gran Sasso Science Institute L’Aquila and
Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa. His research focuses on local
climate governance (mitigation and adaptation), transnational municipal
networks, urban resilience and policy learning.
Teresa Hill has a background in the Community Theatre and Arts
Sectors, working across the UK and Ireland for ten years before
completing an M.Sc. in Leadership for Sustainable Development. She
currently works for the Place-based Climate Action Network and the
Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action at QUB.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Candice Howarth is a Senior Policy Fellow at the LSE Grantham
Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Co-
Director of the Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN). Her
research interests focus on how the co-production of knowledge and
science communication can be used to better inform decision-making in
the context of climate resilience and sustainability challenges. She has an
interdisciplinary background in climate policy, communication and pro-
environmental behaviour with degrees in meteorology (B.Sc.), climate
change (M.Sc.) and a Ph.D. in climate policy and pro-environmental
behaviour.
Kristine Kern has a background in Public Administration, Economics
and earned her Ph.D. in Political Science (Freie Universität Berlin). Kris-
tine has worked and researched in Germany, the USA, Sweden, Finland
and The Netherlands. Her current research interests concentrate on
climate and energy governance, transnational municipal networks and
sustainability transitions.
Matthew Lane is a Researcher in Sustainable Urban Governance at the
University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on how city and regional
governments are coping with an increased responsibility to act on crises
of sustainability despite having limited legal, institutional, political and
economic capacity to do so. He has undertaken fieldwork in the UK,
Zambia, China and the USA.
Richard McLernon is Resilience Coordinator in Belfast City Council,
managing programmes on climate and resilience, Belfast One Million
Trees Programme and Belfast Urban Childhood Framework. Richard
worked in community development in South and North Belfast, and with
victims/survivors of the NI conflict, before joining Council to work in
Community Safety.
Gustavo Montes de Oca is a writer and social entrepreneur currently
developing a platform coop for community-owned shared electric
mobility. He explores commoning solutions with Our Common Climate.
Ellie Murtagh is a Climate Adaptation Services Specialist at Sniffer,
a Scottish sustainability charity. She works on the Adaptation Scot-
land programme, a Scottish government-funded initiative which provides
advice and support to help organisations, businesses and communities
prepare for and build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Her
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
role involves supporting the public sector and benchmarking their adap-
tation progress, collating learning on place-based adaptation and climate
finance.
Abderrahim Nekkache is a Ph.D. Researcher in Business and Manage-
ment at Alliance Manchester Business School, the University of Manch-
ester. His research focuses on digital transformation, innovation manage-
ment and sociology of work.
Pauline O’Flynn is an organiser working in human rights and social and
environmental justice in Belfast. She is currently involved in campaigns for
sustainable neighbourhoods, mutual aid and community growing initia-
tives through her work with Participation and Practice of Rights (PPR)
and Grow Community Gardens.
James Orr has an academic background in law, town planning and lead-
ership. Currently, he is the Director for Friends of the Earth in Northern
Ireland and a Climate Commissioner for the Belfast Climate Commission.
In his previous career, he worked in local government and the Wildfowl
and Wetlands Trust.
Adam Peacock is a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Insti-
tute of Sustainable Futures at Keele University. His core research inter-
ests include user-centric design in Smart Local Energy Systems, consumer
perceptions within energy transitions and changing rural-urban gover-
nance. He also has a background in Geographic Information Systems.
Zoe P. Robinson is Professor of Sustainability in Higher Education and
Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at Keele University.
She is a Researcher, Educator and Practitioner in the field of sustainability
science. Her current research focuses on user-centred and governance
approaches to sustainability and the net-zero transition.
Erica Russell is a part-time Postdoctoral Researcher focusing on climate
change and carbon emissions at sub-national level, climate governance,
carbon embodied in supply chains—with a specific focus on the built envi-
ronment and land use. Consultancy work: supporting new climate change
business models, embodied carbon in the built environment and land use.
Amanda Slevin is an Environmental Sociologist with 20+ years expe-
rience in community development, adult and community education.
Co-Director of QUB’s Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Action, Amanda works with the Place-based Climate Action Network
through which she co-founded Belfast Climate Commission and chairs
its Community Climate Action Working Group.
Lucy Stone is a Climate Writer and Strategist working in philanthropy.
She is a Director of a climate foundation and also on the board of a
community energy organisation, and explores commoning solutions with
Our Common Climate.
Lynda Sullivan is a writer and activist. She previously worked for human
rights organisations in Ireland before spending 5 years in Peru accom-
panying Andean communities in their resistance against mega extractive
projects. She is currently working on the issues of climate justice and
extractivism with Friends of the Earth NI.
Bob Walley is a Lecturer in Community Leadership and Positive Envi-
ronments Project Coordinator, University of Central Lancashire. He
has managed local, national and international engagement projects
concerning climate change communication and resilience for over 20
years, focusing on levels of empowerment, mobilisation or resistance. He
is also a co-founder of the Manchester-based volunteer-led cooperative
Envirolution.
Rebecca Wells graduated from her MSc Environment and Development
at the London School of Economics in December 2020. Her Masters’
dissertation research was a comparative analysis of the Oxford Citi-
zens’ Assembly and the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury. Rebecca
presented this research at the Place-based Climate Action Network’s
Climate Praxis Conference in September 2020. She now works in the
UK Civil Service.
Paloma Yáñez Serrano is a Ph.D. Researcher in Social Anthropology
with Visual Media, University of Manchester. She is an independent
ethnographic filmmaker and social anthropologist interested in methods
of adaptation humans develop to address changing environment, tech-
nology and political conflicts. Her research focuses on people’s adaptation
to industrial agriculture and changing landscape in southern Spain.
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Overview of place-based adaptation projects studies 19
Table 8.1 Milestones of local climate action (external funding
bodies in brackets where applicable) 87
Table 9.1 Considerations for Cash et al.’s (2002) salience,
credibility and legitimacy criteria in the CCC’s tender
documentation (CCC, 2019b) 100
xxv
PART I
Community and Place in Local Climate Praxis
CHAPTER 1
Local Climate Praxis in Practice: Community
Climate Action in Belfast
Amanda Slevin, John Barry, Teresa Hill, James Orr,
Pauline O’Flynn, Lynda Sullivan, and Richard McLernon
Highlights Explores local climate praxis as transformative climate action
with and in diverse communities across Belfast. Community climate action
can tackle injustices, aid peace building and enable a just transition.
Keywords Climate breakdown ·Multi-level climate action ·Citizen
participation ·Community climate action ·Climate praxis ·Participatory
action research ·Northern Ireland
A. Slevin (B)·J. Barry ·T. Hill
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University
Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
e-mail: a.slevin@qub.ac.uk
J. Orr ·L. Sullivan
Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
P. O’Flynn
Participation and the Practice of Rights, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_1
3
4A. SLEVIN ET AL.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forcefully disrupts our social world, it offers
a glimpse of large-scale social unrest, accelerated mortality and multi-
level inequalities inherent to the climate and ecological crises. It also
illustrates some salutatory lessons that could be ‘read across’ from how
states and communities have responded to the pandemic and they could
or should respond to the planetary emergency (Barry, 2020). Faced
with irrefutable scientific evidence of climate breakdown, many govern-
ments have declared a Climate and Ecological Emergency, including
the Northern Ireland Assembly (February 2020); however, Northern
Ireland (NI) is the only part of the UK without its own climate legis-
lation. Offering hope that NI may soon develop effective climate policy,
recent collaborations between Climate Coalition Northern Ireland (NI’s
largest civil society network for climate action), cross-party politicians and
legal experts culminated in introduction of NI’s first Climate Change
Bill (Macauley, 2021). While emergency declarations and evolving policy
frameworks are central to societal shifts towards a sustainable future,
change is required across macro-, meso- and micro-levels of our social
world. A fundamental question we must consider is how do we enable
a genuinely inclusive, just transition to low carbon, healthier and fairer
communities and societies?
Evolving partnerships of public, private and third sector groups offer
insights into this crucial matter, leading the way in place-based climate
action, conceptually and practically, as we elucidate in this chapter on
community climate action co-written by members of the Community
Climate Action Working Group of Belfast Climate Commission.
Place-Based Climate Action in Belfast
With approximately 343,542 people, 18% of the population and almost
30% of all jobs in NI (BCC, 2020), Belfast city is home to NI’s first
Climate Commission (the first such commission on the island of Ireland).
Formed in 2019, Belfast Climate Commission is one of three city-based
climate commissions and two theme-based platforms established as part
of the ESRC-funded, UK-wide Place-based Climate Action Network
(PCAN). PCAN brings together researchers and actors from the public,
R. McLernon
Belfast City Council, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
1 LOCAL CLIMATE PRAXIS IN PRACTICE … 5
private and third sectors to collaborate on translating climate policy into
action ‘on the ground’ to bring about transformative change. Co-chaired
by Queen’s University Belfast and Belfast City Council (BCC), Belfast
Climate Commission develops robust evidence to inform place-based
climate action in the region, in partnership with local stakeholders and
PCAN partners. Involving Commissioners and Commission members,
the Commission’s four working groups illustrate its thematic orienta-
tion: Business and Finance; Community Climate Action; Just Transition;
and Youth. The Commission is one strand of city-level climate action,
complimenting and contributing to BCC-led endeavours like the Belfast
Resilience Strategy and One Million Trees partnership project (BCC,
2020).
Amidst innovations in city-level policy and practice lie major chal-
lenges—we live in a high-carbon society in which macro-level systems
can be reticent to change, thus leading to ‘carbon lock-in’. At micro-
and meso-levels, challenges include public understanding, democratic
legitimacy, acceptance and engagement with essential multi-level climate
actions; and further compounding these difficulties are limited state, busi-
ness and civil society capacities to drive climate mitigation and adaptation
within communities and wider society. The ‘Carbon Roadmap’ developed
by Belfast Climate Commission and PCAN colleagues is a vital starting
point for city-level GHG reduction targets, elucidating key sectors that
require urgent attention—domestic housing (39% of emissions), trans-
port (20%), public and commercial buildings (24%) and industry (18%)
(Gouldson et al., 2020). Such research demonstrates the necessity of
targeted climate action across society, from individuals and communities,
through SMEs and industry, to local authorities and regional infras-
tructure. The Commission seeks to affect change across these various,
interconnected levels because ‘a resource efficient, low carbon and climate
resilient city will not only be a better place to live, work and visit;
it will also be a more prosperous and resilient place, better placed to
respond to future economic and environmental shocks’ (Belfast Climate
Commission, 2019, p. 1). With a focus on ‘bottom-up’ approaches, the
Commission’s Community Climate Action Working Group (CCAWG)
seeks to co-develop participative methodologies for climate action in
and with communities across Belfast, as essential micro- and meso-level
components of a just transition.
6A. SLEVIN ET AL.
Complexity of Community
Climate Action in Belfast
Globally, we see exciting examples of citizen involvement in the transi-
tion to a sustainable future, including community energy projects, tree
planting for carbon sequestration, community gardens, eco-villages and
social movements like Extinction Rebellion Youth Strikes for Climate and
Transition Towns. Recognising the importance of citizen participation,
key questions underpin the work of the CCAWG—effective climate action
requires changes at all levels of society, how do we involve all citizens
in community-level climate action? Especially working-class communities,
young people and others beyond the ‘usual suspects’ one sees represented
in standard city and state-based green policy consultation processes? That
is, the engagement and participation (not simply passive consultation) of
citizens beyond what are sometimes viewed as the ‘urban, educated guilty
middle classes’?
‘Community’ is often regarded a locus for meso-level citizen partici-
pation, yet how do we understand community for the purpose of climate
action? This question is most pertinent in Northern Ireland where the
legacy of ethno-nationalist conflict means ‘community’ can be used in
an exclusionary sense to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’. As Anderson (1991)
articulates in his work on ‘imagined communities’, people can frame
their identity in relation to national affiliation, whereby understanding
of self is entwined with attachment to a nation-state, even when one can
never know all members of such a large community. Due to ‘The Trou-
bles’, as the conflict between NI’s main social groups became known,
challenges surround interpretations of ‘community’ and, at the risk of
over-simplification and glossing over a long, painful history, a prevalent
binary assessment means many people regard society as comprising two
communities, Catholic and Protestant (BCC, 2020, p. 56). The national
and religious identities of inhabitants are associated with NI’s ‘history of
violent conflict’ and some suggest Protestant communities largely identify
as British whilst Catholic communities largely identify as Irish (Ramsey
& Waterhouse-Bradley, 2018). Devastating outcomes of ‘The Troubles’
include the deaths of over 3,500 people (14 July 1969–31 December
2001) (Sutton, 2020) and over a third of people are estimated ‘to have
experienced a conflict-related traumatic event in their lifetime’ (Griffin
et al., 2019, p. 952). Although ‘conflict is no longer the overriding risk
1 LOCAL CLIMATE PRAXIS IN PRACTICE … 7
factor for Belfast’, its impact is revealed in continued division and segrega-
tion and the city is home to the highest number of interface areas in NI
(BCC, 2020, p. 56). ‘97 security barriers and forms of defensive archi-
tecture’ separate communities and such residential, physical, social and
educational segregation contributes to division, low levels of trust, and
can add to a city’s vulnerability in times of crisis (ibid.).
To understand ‘community’ in NI, one must recognise the power of
‘historic understanding and memory’ (Deane, 1994) and how conflict-
related division, trauma and hurt interact with deeply embedded socio-
economic inequalities to produce negative outcomes for many citi-
zens, and pose difficulties for transformative climate action. The term
‘cross-community’ has come to describe collaboration of people with
differing affiliations along nationalist / religious lines; however, with
inclusive, collective efforts to advance multi-level climate action, we
can affect change ‘across-community’, bringing together people from
across society1to co-develop a healthier, sustainable and more peaceful
society (Slevin, 2019). After all, ‘climate breakdown doesn’t care if we’re
Catholic, Protestant or Atheist’ (ibid.), and, though space does not permit
a fuller elaboration, there are connections between community peace-
building, the riven places of Belfast and indeed ‘peace’ or sustainability
with the planet. The work of Belfast Climate Commission is (implic-
itly) oriented towards the dynamic interplay of people, peace, planet and
place—a divided city and people, facing the climate emergency.
Local Climate Praxis in Practice
Commitment to collaboration with communities is inherent to the
Community Climate Action Working Group, which comprises members
from public sector organisations, community, voluntary, environmental
and activist groups. We share Ledwith’s view that community is ‘a
complex system of interrelationships woven across social difference,
diverse histories and cultures, and determined in the present by polit-
ical and social trends’ (2007, p. 32). Community can take various
1For example, categories specified in Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act (1998):
persons of different religious belief, political opinion, racial group, age, marital status
or sexual orientation; men and women generally; persons with a disability and persons
without; and persons with dependants and persons without (Equality Commission, 2010,
p. 7).
8A. SLEVIN ET AL.
forms including (1) territory or locality; (2) a communality of interest
or an interest group; (3) a group sharing a common condition or
problem (Wilmott, 1989, p. 2). Such framing allows us to consider
climate action across Belfast’s four main geographical areas (North,
South, East, West), being cognisant of the city’s unique social char-
acteristics and diverse communities. In a city like Belfast, which bears
the scars of prolonged conflict, participative approaches to community
climate action may not emerge organically in a manner that transcends
old divisions—meaning new forms of collaboration are necessary to go
beyond dichotomous interpretations of community to create an inclusive
community of communities committed to climate action.
Following the emergence of the coronavirus and subsequent lock-
down, the CCAWG held its first meeting online in April 2020 and
over two months, collaboratively articulated our overarching vision of
co-creating ‘transformative climate action with and in communities
across Belfast’.2The CCAWG’s attention to bottom-up approaches to
climate action is important given intersections between climate injustices
and socio-economic inequalities (HM Government, 2017; IPCC, 2018;
Mendez, 2015; UN, 2019) and the necessity of participatory approaches
to community engagement, beyond ‘tokenistic consultations’ (McNamara
& Buggy, 2017, pp. 449–450). Furthermore, the highest proportion of
properties at risk of flooding in NI are in deprived areas (27%) (BCC,
2020, p. 52) and low-income households are likely to have lower capacity
and resources to adapt to the consequences of climate breakdown (HM
Government, 2017,p.10).
In the CCAWG’s development phase, we considered principles and
priorities to underpin our collective work and agreed to undertake
research on community climate action to strengthen our evidence base
and make informed decisions about future initiatives. We decided to
undertake a participator y action research (PAR) initiative (ethical approval
granted by Queen’s University Belfast) as PAR is research concerned with
change ‘rather than simply understanding’ (Dunne et al., 2005, p. 25)
and our mixed methods research is underpinned by the explicit aim of
gathering data to aid reflection and collaboratively enhance community
climate action in Belfast. Influenced by Paulo Freire’s articulation of
praxis as ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’
2For more information on the CCAWG: https://www.belfastclimate.org.uk/commun
ity-climate-action-working-group.
1 LOCAL CLIMATE PRAXIS IN PRACTICE … 9
(Slevin et al., 2020), our approach to climate praxis aids knowledge co-
production to co-create visions, ideas and knowledge as a basis for specific,
contextualised solutions (Furuya, 2016).
In autumn 2020, we commenced an exploratory survey to gain insights
into community climate action in Belfast and possibilities for future
collaboration. The voluntary, opt-in nature of a formal online survey
and its launch during the COVID-19 pandemic were not conducive to
recruitment, particularly as many of our target group were either on
furlough/ unemployed/ or balancing work and family commitments.
Consequently, 25 people completed our survey; even with a limited
sample, valuable findings emerged from the contributions of respon-
dents who undertook paid and unpaid work with organisations whose
reach spanned activities in one community to national and international
groups, across domains such as climate activism, community develop-
ment, environmental NGOs, international development and the public
sector. Participants were located in North, South and East Belfast and the
wider Belfast region, but there were no participants from West Belfast. Of
those who participated in the research, 15 people identified as female, 10
as male and the age range spanned 18–66+ years (majority of participants
were aged 35–54, n=13).
Respondents shared diverse understandings of community climate
action that ranged from local-level practical actions to reduce individual
carbon footprints, through community-level activity as a momentum for
broader social change, to critical multi-level analysis that encapsulated
global-local interconnections. Interpretations included ‘climate action
that involves everyone in the community and that represents the diver-
sity that exists in that community’ (participant 2); ‘encourage and enable
all members of the community to engage in appropriate action to mitigate
and ameliorate climate change’ (participant 21); ‘working together to save
the planet’ (participant 24). Participants shared their top priorities for
community climate action, which included education, awareness-raising,
reduction of GHG emissions, addressing inequality and influencing poli-
cymakers; they also outlined categories of climate action-related work they
currently undertake and types of work they would like their organisation
to undertake. The most popular forms of current activity were awareness
raising (n=18), information provision (n=12), policy analysis (n=
10) and political lobbying (n=10). In contrast, participants said they
10 A. SLEVIN ET AL.
would like their organisations to undertake activities focused on commu-
nity resilience initiatives (n=12), educational programmes (formal [n=
14] and non-formal [n=11]), political lobbying (n=10).
Survey data has aided CCAWG identification of next steps and
provided justification for new collaborations—18 of 25 participants said
there is insufficient inter-organisational collaboration around climate
change. Rationale for a lack of collaboration included resource
constraints; groups working in isolation; communities not being invited
to policy and strategic development initiatives; a lack of leadership from
politicians and councillors with regard to climate action. Participants
continued to outline characteristics, priorities and participants of poten-
tial Community Climate Action Networks and most participants said they
would like to get involved with a network in their area (yes =18, maybe
=6, no =1).
Moving from Reflection to Action
As a new group, the Community Climate Action Working Group quickly
coalesced around a shared goal of enhancing community climate action
in and with communities, as a key element of place-based climate action.
Our PAR initiative commenced with an exploratory survey to develop
an evidence base to influence our activities; interviews and focus groups
will be facilitated by the PAR PI (Slevin) to generate further data. Local
climate praxis, as ongoing symbiosis of reflection and action, is inherent
to our ongoing collaborations and a benefit of our PAR work thus far
has been to raise the Commission’s profile, culminating in new connec-
tions and ideas for community climate action. In tandem with planning
community-level activities, the CCAWG has expanded to include some
organisations who contributed to our PAR project, demonstrating early
benefits of an initiative that will continue for some time. Even weak-
nesses within our exploratory survey offer valuable learning in terms of
encouragement to undertake further engagement work with different
communities.
As we strive to advance a just transition to a low-carbon, sustain-
able future, it is essential that we bring as many people as possible with
us on the journey. In the case of Belfast, and Northern Ireland more
broadly, societal inequalities and divisions pose significant challenges but
1 LOCAL CLIMATE PRAXIS IN PRACTICE … 11
in addressing those difficulties, we have opportunities to co-create inclu-
sive, participative, place-specific approaches to enable capacity-building,
collective action and impactful results across all levels of society.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
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license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 2
Putting the ‘Place’ in Place-Based Climate
Action: Insights from Climate Adaptation
Initiatives Across Scotland
Ellie Murtagh and Matthew Lane
Highlights Understanding and responding to the unique context and
challenges of places is fundamental to the success of place-based adapta-
tion projects.
Keywords Place ·Climate adaptation ·Partnerships ·Scotland
Introduction
This chapter critically examines the concept of ‘place’ in relation to locally
situated climate adaptation projects in order to better understand how
this concept is being interpreted, negotiated and acted upon by practi-
tioners. As evidenced by the contributions throughout this book, there
is currently a groundswell of interest in focusing on ‘place’ as a scale
E. Murtagh
Sniffer/University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
e-mail: ellie@sniffer.org.uk
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_2
15
16 E. MURTAGH AND M. LANE
through which to deliver climate action projects and engender more
climate literate individuals and communities. Following on from govern-
ment discourse around place-making, the idea of place-based engagement
with climate change and sustainability governance is gaining traction
(PCAN, 2019; Vallance et al., 2019). Despite this, however, to date,
little attempt has been made to understand how the concept of ‘place’ is
understood by already existing climate action projects, and the role that
place has played as an organising principle for coordinating action among
co-located stakeholders.
To make an initial attempt at remedying this oversight, the chapter
first briefly engages with the academic literature on the idea of place and
place identity as well as emerging thoughts on their application to climate
change adaptation specifically. Drawing on original qualitative research,
the chapter briefly outlines the research project’s methodological under-
pinning before discussing findings from interviews with lead practitioners
from four adaptation initiatives in Scotland. We use these projects to
ground some initial thoughts regarding the need to recognise the impor-
tance of place as a complex and value-laden mobiliser for collective climate
action at a local scale.
Place in the Literature
The concept of ‘place’ is largely ineffable but is variously drawn upon to
try and capture the complex interaction of agencies, objects and relation-
ships which give meaning to particular locations. In turn, appreciation
of the concept and the assigning of value to what it represents for indi-
viduals and communities can powerfully shape identity and attachment
to particular places. The concept of place identity was first proposed by
Proshansky (1978) who defined it as ‘dimensions of self that define the
individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment by
means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs,
preferences, feelings, values, goals and behavioural tendencies and skills
relevant to this environment’ (Proshansky, 1978, p. 155). Paasi (1986)
further developed the concept of place identity through distinguishing
M. Lane (B)
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
e-mail: matthew.lane@ed.ac.uk
2 PUTTING THE ‘PLACE’ IN PLACE-BASED … 17
two separate facets of place identity, be that (i) the place identity of a
place, which relates to how places are presented, promoted, identified or
distinguished from other places through nature, culture, geography and
history of that place; or (ii) people’s place identity which pertains to how
individuals exist within a place and their ‘sense of place’. Place identity can
thus influence behaviours and activities as well as individual and collective
well-being.
More recently, it has been argued that place identity has particular rele-
vance to climate change adaptation. Climate impacts will always be felt the
strongest by individuals and communities most ‘local’ to those impacts.
The more attached and embedded the relationships between those people
and the places in question, the more devastating the impacts are likely
to be. Fresque-Baxter and Armitage (2012) highlight that adaptation
often focuses on the material assets required to build adaptive capacity,
with less consideration to the nonmaterial or subjective facets of adap-
tation such as identity, belief or values. Value-based approaches can help
explore what people value most about their everyday lives and how these
social values are likely to be affected by environmental changes. It there-
fore seeks to redress the emphasis of adaptation planning on physical
impacts by putting the lifestyle and wellbeing attributes that matter most
to communities at the centre of adaptation planning (David et al., 2017,
p. 167).
Place-based adaptation is interpreted within this chapter as actions
which involve shaping, developing or enhancing a ‘place’ in response to
current and projected climate change, whilst contributing to a broader
context of change and social and ecological justice. Such actions, however,
have had limited review or testing within empirical studies (Peng et al.,
2020). With the aim of providing insight which can better inform future
climate action projects seeking to pro-actively draw upon the idea of
‘place’ as an organising principle, in what follows we engage with four
place-based adaptation initiatives in Scotland.
Case Study and Methods
The Scottish policy landscape encourages place-based ways of working.
The Scottish Government have adopted ‘The Place Principle’, which
promotes a shared understanding of place and the need for a collaborative
approach to a place’s services and assets to improve outcomes for commu-
nities as well as contributing to the achievement of collective outcomes
18 E. MURTAGH AND M. LANE
of Scotland’s National Performance Framework (Scottish Government,
2019). The Community Empowerment Act also enables communities to
have greater involvement in local decision-making by placing Community
Planning Partnerships (CPPs) on a statutory footing to plan and deliver
local outcomes.
Place-based working in Scotland is diverse in practice ranging from
holistic explorations of place to focused initiatives on a specific issue,
such as climate adaptation. The Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009
requires a Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme (SCCAP) and
also makes climate adaptation a statutory requirement for all Scottish
public bodies, with mandatory reporting of progress. As a result of policy
levers for place-based working and climate adaptation action alongside an
increasing recognition of the importance of place, there are a growing
number of place-based adaptation initiatives emerging.
In this chapter, we draw on semi-structured scoping interviews with
the project leaders of four such initiatives, in order to understand the
idea of ‘place’ as an organising concept. The projects explored were:
Highland Adapts, Climate Ready Clyde, Climate Ready Aberdeenshire
and Dundee Climate Action, defined in Table 2.1. The studied projects
were all initiated by local government but are undertaken in partner-
ship with wider stakeholders including community members, public and
private organisations, in order to co-design local action plans. Sniffer, a
Scottish sustainability charity, has been involved in some extent in all four
projects, ranging from technical advice and capacity building through to
providing secretariat support.
Interview questions explored (i) the interpretation and use of the
concept of place within the various place-based adaptation projects, (ii)
how variations in place have been identified and addressed through
partnership projects and (iii) current appreciations for a sense of place
among those participating in adaptation activities. Interview recordings
were transcribed and thematic analysis drawn upon to identify emerging
patterns within the data. Interview quotes are anonymised. To note, the
views expressed in interviews reflect only those of the interviewees and
are not meant to represent the way place is understood collectively by
stakeholders involved with the respective projects. For the purposes of
this short chapter, we are simply interested in how the concept of place is
thought about and understood by those with important organising roles
in ‘place-based’ climate action projects.
2 PUTTING THE ‘PLACE’ IN PLACE-BASED … 19
Table 2.1 Overview of place-based adaptation projects studies
Initiative Description
Climate Ready Aberdeenshire Climate Ready Aberdeenshire is a collaborative
initiative to create Aberdeenshire’s climate change
adaptation and mitigation strategy. It brings together
the views and expertise of a range of diverse
stakeholders from communities, public, private and
3rd sector organisations, to set out how to work
together to meet the challenges of a changing climate
within Aberdeenshire, aiming to launch the Climate
Ready Strategy in 2022
Climate Ready Clyde Climate Ready Clyde is a cross-sector initiative funded
by the Scottish Government and 15 member
organisations to create a shared vision, strategy and
action plan for an adapting Glasgow City Region
Dundee Climate Action In June 2019, Dundee Council declared a Climate
Emergency, recognising the serious and accelerating
environmental, social and economic challenges faced
by climate change. To respond to this challenge, a
partnership Climate Action Plan has been prepared
which has been the culmination of collaborative work,
led by Dundee City Council and co-designed with
public, private and community organisations,
recognising that a concerted city-wide effort is
required. The Plan includes four themes of Energy,
Transport, Waste and Resilience
Highland Adapts The Highland Adapts initiative brings organisations
from across the Highland region together to develop
a unique approach to adapting to climate change.
Jointly resourced and rooted in a deep understanding
of the needs and priorities of communities, the
initiative will develop a strong evidence base setting
out the climate risks and opportunities that are
affecting the Highlands. This evidence will be used to
develop a shared adaptation strategy and action plan
which will embed action to adapt across
organisational, community and sector plans, strategies
and investments
Findings from Practice
The Concept of Place in Existing Place-Based Adaptation Projects
The four place-based adaptation projects explored here come from across
Scotland and encompass rural, urban, coastal and highland environments.
All project leads interviewed were cognisant of the diverse senses of ‘place’
20 E. MURTAGH AND M. LANE
that exist even within the areas they work. The feedback from practi-
tioners presents an idea of ‘place’ interpreted as a multifaceted concept
comprised of intersections of people, nature, built environment, culture,
history and emotions in relation to a specific location. Place, in their
opinion, supports the development of senses of identity, connections and
feelings from interactions with or interpretations of the place; however,
these may differ across individuals, communities and regions based on
lived experience, demography or local geography.
The recognition of differing experiences and interpretations of ‘place’
was used to justify needing to think about place as a concept when under-
taking situated climate action projects. All interviewees expressed strong
feeling towards the need to work differently in each local place. Intervie-
wees felt that a one-size-fits-all approach simply would not work, due to
the specific challenges resulting from geographic, economic and demo-
graphic factors. Likewise, they felt that to explore and overcome these
multiple perspectives, there was need to speak to people to develop a
collaborative and joint view on what place means in the context of taking
action against climate change. It was argued that this must be driven by
and for the community, as those that live there know best what they want
and need, as highlighted by one interviewee.
A place-based approach helps because you’re getting the views of indi-
vidual people in that place…and the needs or challenges of each place are
different, and you are actually taking that into account. It builds better
engagement and relations to people in those places if you get to under-
stand how they live and how they work, and not just paint them all with
the same brush.
It was stressed by interviewees how both place and climate change are
emotive subjects and need to be recognised and treated as such if they are
to complement one another effectively. Interviewees felt that one cannot
and should not take a non-emotional approach to adaptation.
[You] can’t not take an emotional response as climate change will impact
lives, livelihoods, where people live, fundamentally for foreseeable future.
Focusing on a specific place acts as a mechanism to highlight the
emotional, symbolic, spiritual and perceived intrinsic values of the envi-
ronment. It is proposed by Adger et al. (2011) that climate change policy
2 PUTTING THE ‘PLACE’ IN PLACE-BASED … 21
underemphasises the symbolic and psychological aspects of places and risk
to them. This may be addressed through creating space and opportunity
to share and discuss emotions.
One of the key things about place is the intersect between culture and
history…so many future challenges to adaptation are rooted in the past,
whether that is from economic development to post-industrial legacy
to issues with housing, stubborn social problems around health and
vulnerability.
Place as an Organising Principle for Building Partnerships
All of the initiatives recognised the role of place, but not all had as of yet
explored it methodically within the project. Activities so far were mainly
high-level approaches ranging from community-wide surveys to inform
the development of Highland Adapts; stakeholder workshops with partic-
ipants across the public, private, third and community sectors to inform
the Dundee Climate Action Plan; to the creation of a Theory of Change
outlining a vision for a Climate Ready Glasgow City Region and neces-
sary elements required to achieve it through the Climate Ready Clyde
programme.
The ability to build understanding of different views and what place
means collectively to frame wider discussion about the need to adapt was
identified as to how the concept of place can be an enabler for climate
change adaptation. Place was seen to make climate change impacts more
tangible. A place-based approach can also enable identification of places
or communities most ‘at risk’ of climate impacts and work to prioritise
and support them.
Understandings of place, however, are arguably inseparable from
broader multi-level influences of power, politics and policy that shape
engagement with place. Macro-level decision-making about investments
in place can lead to discord within areas that haven’t received similar
financial investment, in turn fostering a sense of disconnectedness to place
which can hamper possibilities of ‘place’ as an enabler for climate action.
An example of this was provided by a Scottish city experiencing massive
regeneration in some areas, whilst other parts have persistently high levels
of multiple deprivation.
Similarly, a noted barrier was tension in interpretations of place and the
challenges in building and reaching consensus. The presence and activity
22 E. MURTAGH AND M. LANE
of place-based adaptation partnerships were identified as mechanisms
to overcome this challenge through participative processes with repre-
sentative stakeholders. A multi-stakeholder approach can bring together
stakeholders and community members to highlight important aspects of
place, help co-design plans and shape activity. Place-based adaptation
initiatives are seen to help create and anchor institutions in the process. In
this respect, they can also help build and strengthen relationships. Inter-
viewees felt, however, that whilst there may be different outcomes sought
by each partner, the most important aspect of a joined-up approach is
that the partnership is a collective listener to the needs and aspirations of
the community and use their voice to shape overall response and enhance
delivery.
Appreciating the Diverse (and Constantly Changing) Power of Place
Exploring, understanding and responding to the unique context and
challenges of different places was seen as fundamental to the success of
the place-based adaptation projects. In addition to this understanding,
however, and in lieu of the fully integrated, joined-up approach to
place-making reflected upon above, interviewees highlighted the need
to appreciate the shifting relationships to place captured by any partic-
ular project scope. For example, interviewees felt that there is often a
regional collective sense of identity, whilst simultaneously there are unique
and bespoke senses of identity at the more local, community scale. For
instance, within the area of Aberdeenshire, the identity of being from the
‘Shire’ and how this differentiated the lived experience of being from the
‘city’ (Aberdeen) was highlighted as providing a shared sense of iden-
tity, seeing a large region as one; whilst it was also noted that within
the Highlands there are different senses of places across communities and
even within a singular community, different sense of place exists.
In a similar vein, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020
powerfully illustrates the way in which place attachment and identity
can shift and evolve over time as well as from location to location. For
example, interviewees suggest that the pandemic-associated lockdowns
encouraged people to explore their local place in a lot more depth and
potentially led to an increased appreciation for what’s on the doorstep:
2 PUTTING THE ‘PLACE’ IN PLACE-BASED … 23
You are much more focused on your immediate environment obviously,
because that’s now where you go for entertainment, exercise, food,
health…everything!
It’s forced us to think quite deeply about what are the characteristics of
a place that we value.
With regard to adaptation, these evolving relationships to place exhibit
a very literal form of adaptation, further demonstrating its status as a
constant process of change, rather than something that can simply be
‘done’ in a particular location at a particular point in time.
The pandemic has had significant benefit (to a point) in increasing
people’s awareness of their place and its associated advantages and limita-
tions…[communities]have already been through a life changing emergency
and can tap into feelings and experiences that they’ve gone through… to
be prepared for future emergencies.
Conclusion: Lessons for ‘Place-Based’
Climate Action Projects
Places are shaped by services, assets, natural and economic resources,
history, geography and environmental change as well as by the needs of
the people who live there. Place-based adaptation projects offer a way to
integrate ongoing activities, needs and local priorities to ensure a location
is resilient to climate impacts as well as minimising the burden of diverse
pressures which may be exacerbated under a changing climate. The moti-
vation to further advance place-based adaptation is driven by the potential
to create better places that retain their culture, identity and importance
to those who live there and will be affected by the impacts of climate
change.
Findings presented in this chapter highlight how an understanding
of ‘place’ can enhance climate action projects. In accordance with the
wider ambitions of this edited collection, the reflections from place-based
adaptation project leads are presented here as potential learnings for
others seeking to mobilise the concept of place as a tool for coordinating
local action against climate change. However, given the context-specificity
of the people-place-adaptation nexus discussed through this chapter, it
would be counter-productive to provide specific recommendations for
how place(s) should be engaged with by climate action projects. What the
24 E. MURTAGH AND M. LANE
chapter has hoped to achieve, however, is a raising of awareness regarding
what a greater appreciation for place may do to spur adaptation.
We argue here that this appreciation takes two contrasting yet equally
important forms. Firstly, that place is a concept which has the potential
to disrupt and undermine aspirations for climate action if practitioners are
not acutely aware of the powerful (and diverse) ways in which people feel
and experience attachment to certain locations. Secondly, that place can
offer an organising principle which can be actively drawn upon to high-
light already existing relationships between co-located stakeholders and
between those stakeholders and the threats posed by climate change. As
suggested by one interviewee, the success of climate adaptation projects
will in large part be determined by local adaptive capacity. The complex
nature of the relationship between adaptive capacity and ‘place’ thus calls
for further research engagement. In the meantime, the more cognisant
we are of the powerful and multifaceted ways in which particular places
shape our collective understanding of climate change, the more likely it is
that we will be able to take effective actions.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
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license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 3
A Commoners’ Climate Movement
Lucy Stone, Gustavo Montes de Oca, and Ian Christie
Highlights The commoning approach to climate action collectively
claims, creates and stewards the net-zero infrastructure. Commoning
invites people to participate in the transition, to have a stake, not just
a say, and shape their response.
Keywords Climate change ·Commons ·Ostrom ·Community
Collective Action on Climate
The climate transition is already under way, under the banner of ‘net
zero’—the aspiration to completely reduce (or offset) anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions. The oil industry is in crisis whilst the renew-
ables industry speeds ahead (IEA, 2020), agriculture faces transition,
L. Stone (B)·G. Montes de Oca
Our Common Climate, London, UK
e-mail: lucy@ourcommonclimate.org
I. Christie
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_3
27
28 L. STONE ET AL.
whilst the car industry rapidly electrifies. These transitions and govern-
mental action are welcome and necessary, but this top-down approach is
still not generating effective measures fast enough to keep us within the
level of global heating scientists deem ‘safe’ (UNEP, 2020).
These transitions largely exclude citizens, are not designed to avoid
locking in existing inequalities and risk backlash over distributional conse-
quences of climate transitions. All that could narrow the already tight
political space in which elected representatives, governments and corpo-
rations operate (Willis, 2020). Many initiatives for citizens’ engagement
in climate policy measures have been launched (Capstick et al., 2020;
Howarth et al., 2020). However, they have not been effectively connected
to policymaking and they tend to treat people as individual agents/voters
rather than as members of collective movements for change. We argue
that many climate solutions are based on outdated models both of ‘human
nature’ and of management of collective action problems. This constrains
the ‘possibility space’ for action by overlooking the ‘third pillar’ of civil
society—cooperative community-based action.
Our chapter draws from Elinor Ostrom’s scholarship on managing
commons (Ostrom, 1990) and a wider literature review, and our reflec-
tions as practitioners in the domains of community energy, agriculture
and transport.
Commons and Commoning: What Are They?
Common land for grazing and woodland use is probably the most readily
recognised form of commoning—ancient practices of managing shared
access (though not necessarily via shared ownership). In the UK, legally
defined ‘common land’ has declined from around 30% in the 1600s to
3% now (Shrubsole, 2019). In 2006, the UK Commons Act attempted
to ensure that commons were owned and managed collectively, with
new mechanisms for registering commons and to establish collective local
governance mechanisms. In Scotland, where the ‘Clearances’ of common
land took place through the nineteenth century, there are efforts to
remedy this with legislation (the Land Reform Act 2003) and the subse-
quent movement for community land buy-outs, such as the 5,200 acres
of Langholm Moor bought by the community.
Although Indigenous communities have legal ownership of just 10% of
the world’s land, they steward half of all collectively managed land. Their
focus on community management protects large tracts of land from to
3 A COMMONERS’ CLIMATE MOVEMENT 29
land grabs, exploitation, deforestation and development, worsening the
climate and biodiversity crises (Common Ground, 2016).
There is a wide array of models for collective self-governance of
common resources available in the UK and globally in 2020. Here,
we refer to ‘Commoning’ broadly as collective self-governance of any
common good resources by their co-producers and users—an approach which
is not just about the ownership model but about shared use, collec-
tive governance and sustainable stewardship over the long term. People
who participate in these processes are ‘commoners’, and in their contin-
uous evolution of rules and relationships to each other and the world
around them, they demonstrate a richer capacity to collaborate than
classic economics ascribes to people (Ostrom, 1990).
Locking Out the Commoners
Current approaches to climate change have inherited from the economic
systems responsible for the crisis an outdated view of humans and a
discredited understanding of collective action problems. The outdated
view of persons as John Stuart Mill’s Homo Economicus —individual-
istic, rational, self-interested maximisers—sees people as depleting the
shared environment and collective resources because the individual bene-
fits of extraction are higher than the costs, which are shared and may
be displaced in time and space. Climate change solutions are therefore
designed on the basis of government needing to adjust the market, to
cost the externalities for rational individual choices (carbon trading and
taxes, grants), rather than based on a deeper understanding of people
as HumanKind (Bregman, 2020)—capable of altruism and collabora-
tion. The outdated and incorrect understanding of shared resources, as
inevitably misused—the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin,
1968)—justifies a top-down, government-controlled approach.
Ostrom pointed out that climate policy has been constructed on
the basis of this outdated theory of collective action, which is wrongly
pessimistic about people’s capacity for self-governance and overcoming
of collective action problems (Ostrom, 2010). Ostrom won the 2009
Nobel Prize for Economics for discrediting the ‘tragedy of the commons’
framing of unsustainable resource use and showing, with detailed evidence
that, contra Hardin, there are and have been many groups across cultures
and socio-ecological conditions that successfully self-organise to manage
common resources sustainably. The implicit model of the human, here, is
30 L. STONE ET AL.
based on reciprocity, shared interests and values (see, for example, Wright,
2000;Bregman,2020).
Collective self-governance of common resources can in some circum-
stances be superior to top-down government—in the case of carbon,
community forestry management sequesters more carbon than the
government-run equivalent schemes (Chhatre & Agarawal, 2009).
Carbon Myopia: States See
Symptoms, Commoners See Causes
The effects of our model of abstraction, extraction, over-consumption and
disposal are resulting in various ecosystem boundaries being threatened.
There is mass biodiversity loss; soil degradation threatens farming collapse
(FAO, 2020); microplastic pollution is ubiquitous (Cox et al., 2019); and
air pollution is one of the leading causes of death worldwide (WHO,
2019). Excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, a by-product
of this system of production and consumption, are a proxy for broader
ecological devastation.
From the perspective of states and international bodies, the chal-
lenge of catastrophic ecosystem degradation has been reduced to a single
measurable chemical, carbon dioxide, and the workings of a complex
of nested problems reduced to a complicated system of accounting for
this proxy. Managing for a single proxy, when the situation is far more
complex, can create further problems. For example, in 2001, the UK
government encouraged the sale of diesel fuel cars to reduce carbon
intensity of UK transport. This singular focus—or carbon myopia—unin-
tentionally intensified toxic air pollution.
The carbon-accounting view of climate change has been helpful in
interpreting the science, to guide the parameters, and focus minds.
The carbon focus does not guarantee a system of stewardship that
remains within other ecological boundaries, let alone addresses inequality
(Eisenstein, 2018).
Possibility Space
Recognising people in their full complexity and involving communities
alongside markets and state increase the available range of possibilities
for tackling environmental degradation. For example, community-based
wind turbine schemes are able to secure community support where other
3 A COMMONERS’ CLIMATE MOVEMENT 31
forms of energy developments are blocked (Baxter et al., 2020). Local
context, investment scale and local distribution of benefits to partici-
pating members reflect some of Ostrom’s design principles for successful
commons: Ostrom showed that when people are involved in common-
pool resource decisions, they are more willing to accept consequences
that might otherwise be seen as unacceptable ‘sacrifices’ (Ostrom, 1990).
In commoning, the one-dimensional picture of the human associ-
ated with neoliberal political economy is replaced by the more complex
model Ostrom described. When people are directly involved in managing
resources which they co-produce and use, the solutions that emerge
benefit from the community’s local knowledge. Management of common-
pool resources on the basis of the design principles proposed by Ostrom
(1990) secures the stock of resources and the flow of benefits required,
and also generates social trust among the stakeholders. One commons
will satisfy many needs of many stakeholders, resulting in solutions
that improve local circumstances, but also propagate benefits into the
environments they are nested in.
How Do We ‘Common’the Climate?
It is clear that a stable climate, an ecosystem in balance, is a common
good. However, the atmosphere is not a suitable candidate for manage-
ment as a commons. According to Ostrom’s design principles, the
atmosphere would require clear group boundaries, but the atmosphere
is nebulous and affects all humans, indeed all living beings.
Whilst the climate symptom of excess emissions needs urgent action,
the commons approach focuses on the cause: the distorted relationships of
people to planetary resources, assets and environments. The commoning
approach is to collectively claim, create and steward the infrastructure of
a net-zero world.
Land Use
Land use needs to be transformed in the coming decades—addressing
deforestation, increasing tree planting, reducing agriculture impacts and
restoring peatlands (CCC, 2020). Farmers face huge amounts of risk and
uncertainty, which will only increase as the impacts of climate and other
environmental crises grow. Community-managed or community-owned
32 L. STONE ET AL.
farms share the risks as well as the benefits with the farmers and share-
holders sometimes provide labour as well. Community land trusts are
created when communities come together to purchase land (or it is gifted)
to develop and steward it for the benefit of the community over the long
term. This may include community farms, or it could be to create housing
developments rented at affordable rates or to create other community
enterprises such as shared workplaces. A community land trust, as with
community development trusts, is an institution collectively managed as
well as owned, with benefits legally defined and safeguarded in perpetuity.
Creating land and other local assets in collective, local stewardship
yields many benefits, direct and indirect (Capital Economics, 2020).
Community land trusts have rapidly grown in the UK, mostly as a way
to provide affordable housing but also to preserve local assets facing
decline, such as pubs, post offices and shops. There are nearly 300 such
land trusts, half of which have been established in the last 2 years alone.
The developments are designed with the community’s close involvement
and permission, and freed from the pure profit motive, sustainability and
affordability take priority. As the UK meets the shortage of housing whilst
addressing climate change, community land trusts are a positive way to
make transitions towards sustainability.
Clean Energy Commons
Renewable energy will be a dominant feature of the energy landscape, as
well as of the landscape itself. Community energy systems are a commons
managed in line with Ostrom’s design principles (Melville et al., 2017,
2018). Community energy organisations raise funds locally from share-
holder members for local renewable energy projects. Local knowledge
and relationships make the development of the projects possible. Typi-
cally, they offer returns to shareholders as well as amassing community
funds for improving localities in consultation with members. Community
energy projects generate social, environmental and economic benefits for
diverse stakeholders (Armstrong, 2015; Melville et al., 2017; Robinson
&Stephen,2020). For example, schools and community centres benefit
from discounted electricity rates. In addition, many community energy
organisations allocate funds to support fuel poverty through advice lines
or installing energy efficiency measures (Armstrong, 2015).
Whilst generation capacity is currently not massive at around 500 MW,
there are 286 community energy organisations in England alone, and
3 A COMMONERS’ CLIMATE MOVEMENT 33
this is growing despite a hostile policy context (Community Energy
England, 2020). Many of these projects are in urban areas, using rooftops.
The size of projects appears to be growing too as the sector matures
and the technology costs drop—a project in Devon plans to install a
distributed 1GW of electricity. This is not, as Ostrom would emphasise,
a panacea. Commons models for community energy need careful design
and governance to avoid exacerbating problems of mistrust, exclusion and
inequality (ibid.). However, the evidence indicates great scope for policies
that treat sustainable energy systems as commons and harness the capa-
bilities of citizens and local communities alongside the private sector and
national state (Webb et al., 2021).
A Climate Commons Narrative
The prevailing top-down climate policy narrative is not translating high
public concern into the urgently needed political mandate for greater
action. This narrative implies that an overwhelming, abstract and distant
issue is being resolved at a central level by politicians and bureaucrats
(Marshall, 2015). People receive the message of the urgency only to
be told it is being managed by governments or only to be urged to
make individual behavioural changes, which can feel tokenistic (Marshall,
2015), or simply to campaign or vote or deliberate about changes to be
implemented by experts.
Climate narratives are falling into the trap of communicating climate as
a single issue, rather than presenting it as the symptom of the deeper and
bigger problem of unsustainable resource use that needs to be addressed.
The narrative that we are separate from nature—which serves as a ‘free’
resource which we must manage, even when sustainably, for our use—
is fuelling the destruction of the natural world (see, for example, White,
1967; Plumwood, 2001). It is not even true to the realities of our biology
and ecological situatedness (Haraway, 2016)—we live in socio-ecological
interdependence with a multitude of species from gut microbes to the
pollinators who provide our food. Commoning approaches recognise our
interdependence—with each other and with the land. (The origin of
‘common land’ in Gaelic, actually meant ‘people together as one with
the land’ [Menzies, 2014].)
Commoning invites people to participate in the transition, to have a
stake, not just a say, and to shape their own neighbourhood’s response.
It is a creative invitation to exercise more agency even than the ‘citizen
34 L. STONE ET AL.
control’ over planning that Sherry Arnstein (1969) called for. This space
of action—the local, community level—produces tangible, meaningful
results and multiple benefits (Kaye, 2020). This in turn can then create a
political mandate for further change, whilst increasing local resilience.
The commoning narrative acknowledges that the climate crisis is a big
problem, but invites people to address it jointly, not in isolation, and
at multiple scales, not just top-down. It breaks the problem down and
invites bottom-up community action, and multi-level partnerships. It is
clear there will be upheavals in our patterns of production and consump-
tion, but commoning calls for people to be active in bringing about the
change rather than simply be the beneficiaries or unfortunate losers from
it.
This sense of control and agency has been shown to be important
factors in determining mental and physical health, community empow-
erment and social cohesion. By empowering communities to develop
greater altruism and social support will help ensure communities are not
just surviving but thriving as we mitigate and navigate climate disruption.
One challenge will be to ensure commoning doesn’t create ‘lifeboat-
ism’—shoring up my community resilience whilst other communities face
growing crises. Increasingly, though, there are options for self-organising
groups to provide and procure from others, strengthening demand for
each other’s services. Can we one day connect with other commoners
to procure goods from a community-owned manufacturer, with materials
from miners’ co-ops, powered by community energy and insured by a
cooperative underwriter? Bringing this vision into climate spaces might
help prevent the perpetuation of existing inequalities as we build the new
green economies. In order to meet the climate crisis, we need to rapidly
engage all of society; commoning might be the way we do this.
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3 A COMMONERS’ CLIMATE MOVEMENT 37
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 4
The Envirolution Revolution: Raising
Awareness of Climate Change Creatively
Through Free and Accessible Community
Engagement Festivals
Bob Walley, Ami Crowther, Paloma Yáñez Serrano,
Abderrahim Nekkache, Rui Cepeda, Debapriya Chakrabarti,
and Eugene Boadu
Highlights The use of Freirean praxis and pedagogy is a powerful lens
to use in understanding, and advancing, impactful place-based climate
action. Using non-judgemental and holistic approaches, free community
festivals have the capacity to engage large sections of society and therefore
have the potential to mobilise shifts towards societal change.
B. Walley (B)
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
e-mail: rvwalley1@uclan.ac.uk
A. Crowther ·D. Chakrabarti
School of Environment Education and Development, University of Manchester,
Manchester, UK
P. Yáñez Serrano
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_4
39
40 B. WALLEY ET AL.
Keywords Climate emergency ·Community engagement ·
Environmental education ·Festivals ·Critical consciousness
Introduction
Envirolution is a Manchester-based volunteer-led cooperative which
organises community engagement events concerning climate change. The
group creates spaces where a praxis of learning and reflection can take
place in a holistic, accessible and relevant way, aiming to engage those
individuals who are not currently engaging with climate change as a
subject. Using the teachings of Paulo Freire and the praxis model, Envi-
rolution explores and develops creative ways to engage and empower
people, utilising this reflexive process to inspire participants to take posi-
tive actions. At events Envirolution has organised or been involved with,
the group has interacted with 189,400 attendees across the UK, involved
785 volunteers and provided a platform for 1142 educators, community
organisations, performers and artists. At a local level, Envirolution aims to
play a key role in helping Manchester City Council achieve goals set out in
its Climate Change Action Plan 2020–2025, which includes supporting
and influencing the city to reduce emissions by at least 50% by 2025.
In a wider context, Envirolution aims to raise widespread awareness and
engagement with the climate emergency and mobilise transitions towards
a more sustainable future. Despite engaging significantly high numbers
of participants since it began, the project’s impact has only now been
properly evaluated. Using data from a University of Manchester research
A. Nekkache
Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester,
UK
R. Cepeda
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester,
UK
E. Boadu
Keele Business School, Keele University, Keele, UK
4 THE ENVIROLUTION REVOLUTION … 41
team’s project analysis, this chapter shows how effective this method of
engagement can be and what can be learnt from the Envirolution project.
Methodology
To evaluate how effective Envirolution events have been over the past ten
years, the project analysis took a multi-methods approach. This included
a scoping literature review, analysis of quantitative data on attendance and
participation from previous Envirolution events, and a targeted online
questionnaire survey.
In the associated literature review, existing understandings of commu-
nity engagement and climate change action related to the Envirolution
model were consolidated to situate the research and provide context for
the analysis. The quantitative data collected by Envirolution volunteers at
previous events were analysed and trends were identified. A set of ques-
tionnaires were used to collect information on individuals’ experiences
of Envirolution events, and to understand and analyse the impact that
engaging with Envirolution had on understanding of climate change and
behavioural responses. A total of 40 questionnaires were obtained from:
15 general public attendees, 13 stallholders or workshop providers, 10
Envirolution volunteers and 2 workshop leaders or speakers. Responses
were analysed thematically, drawing out key phrases and concepts.
The Envirolution Model
Praxis is described by Paulo Freire as ‘reflection and action upon the world
to transform it’ (Freire, 1996). Throughout his work as an educator,
Freire stimulated praxis through informed action and critical pedagogy as
a means to liberate powerless communities which he referred to broadly
as the ‘oppressed’. Reflective praxis motivates participants to become crit-
ical subjects, aware of their own contradictions (Freire, 1968). Freire
suggests that the role of the educator is to help others in their own trans-
formation, ‘placing them in a consciously critical position before their
problems’ (Freire, 1968, p. 50). The aims of Envirolution are guided by
Freire’s work and events are created with the ethos and understanding
that considered and careful reflection can lead to positive actions.
As Freire emphasised, ‘the insistence that the oppressed engage in
reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution.
On the contrary, reflection – true reflection – leads to action’ (Freire,
42 B. WALLEY ET AL.
1996, p. 41). Praxis in this sense goes beyond activism in that it pursues
actions that emerge from critical reflection. With this philosophy, Enviro-
lution brings together individuals and organisations who ask themselves
the same question: what can I possibly do about climate change? The
events provide a platform to engage those who may have similar ques-
tions, or due to the incomprehensible scale of the problem, have not
considered a response at all.
Envirolution primarily engages people from the local areas of Fallow-
field, Rusholme, Longsight and Moss Side in Manchester, representing
a multi-cultural demographic of various ages, backgrounds and circum-
stances. Well over half of the attendees are in the park on the day of
the festival simply because it is their local green space, which then gives
them the opportunity to access a free event. All attendees are intro-
duced to facilitators who can provide opportunities for reflection on
climate change, offering relevant and considered positive responses. This
allows participants to choose and decide their actions through critical
reflection, critical participation and collective action. Envirolution festivals
aim to encourage this critical consciousness process in a free and non-
judgemental environment, providing a space for praxis and exploration of
possible ‘transformation of the world’ (Freire, 1996, p.106). Open free
community spaces like these could prove crucial for exploration of the
multi-level changes needed to avoid climate collapse, which depends on
‘the public’s willingness to accept, support, and actively engage’ with the
required socio-economic, cultural, political and structural shifts (Geiger &
Swim, 2016, p.79). The environmental festivals Envirolution volunteers
organise work on the basis that ‘people’s individual issues lead to local
projects; local projects link with others, elsewhere, to form networks and
alliances; those alliances lead to movements that provide a real collective
possibility for change’ (Ledwith, 2007, p. 609).
The Envirolution model also acknowledges how crucial emotional
responses are to understanding people’s perceptions or levels of engage-
ment with the climate emergency. Climate change educator and
researcher Blanche Verlie identified ‘anxiety, frustration, feeling over-
whelmed, guilt and grief’ as natural responses to such an unprecedented
global phenomenon as climate change (Verlie, 2019, p. 751). Engaging
people about impending global social and ecological destruction by high-
lighting the growing consensus that ‘climate change is the result of
human lifestyle and behaviour’ (Roeser, 2012) can ignite many emotional
4 THE ENVIROLUTION REVOLUTION … 43
responses, not all of them productive. By concentrating on effective adap-
tation, ‘hope’ or ‘positive engagement’ can also be created through the
forming of participatory groups (Verlie, 2019 p.751). Critical conscious-
ness, in this sense, helps participants see the world and their place within
it, acknowledging their emotional responses as a crucial element in the
process of praxis and enabling progressive steps forward.
Findings and Discussion
Engagement with Envirolution events has steadily increased over the past
10 years. At the inaugural Envirolution festival in 2010, there were 400
attendees, 52 activity providers and 22 volunteers. This increased to 5000
attendees, 89 activity providers and 52 volunteers in 2019. Those that
engage with Envirolution events consider them to successfully create ‘a
fun and friendly environment’ with educational and awareness activities
that inspire them to ‘make positive changes for a sustainable future’
(Envirolution, 2021). When focusing on the impact that Envirolution
has had on individuals that engage with the organisation, 4 key areas of
impact were identified through analysis of the survey undertaken by the
40 participants.
Learning and Awareness
Positive impacts only happen when people change their attitudes. (Volun-
teer 1)
Questionnaire responses found Envirolution to be ‘educational’, ‘infor-
mative’ and ‘inspiring’. Envirolution events aim to try to appeal to as
many people as possible, so the solar-powered music stages play a range
of world music and act as a hook to attract people from all cultures,
ages and backgrounds. Once at the event, attendees can learn some-
thing new and see what they can get involved with locally. Attendees can
listen to ‘inspirational speakers’ (Attendee 1) or ‘immerse themselves in
environmental activities’ (Stallholder 7). The research also found that a
considerable number of participants shared what they learnt with others
(54% of attendees and 84% of volunteers).
44 B. WALLEY ET AL.
If these kinds of events happened in parks around the country, I believe
the population would be a lot more active in responding to the climate
emergency. (Volunteer 4)
Behavioural Change
Even small changes can have a significant impact. (Attendee 1)
83% of stallholders who participated in the research believe that
their activities support positive changes in people’s daily activities and
behaviours. 90% of volunteers and 69% of visitors state that engaging
with Envirolution made them more environmentally conscious, leading
them to make changes to their daily activities. 5 of the 40 respondents
confirmed that thanks to Envirolution, they have become climate change
activists who actively campaign and engage with community groups,
regularly sharing their knowledge with others.
The groundswell of support from the population, especially a younger
generation fighting for their future, gives hope. (Stallholder 7)
Collaboration
Knowing I’m not the only one with this feeling. (Volunteer 1)
After Envirolution, many attendees have collaborated on environmental
projects and learnt about other groups they can get involved with. Also,
taking part in Envirolution events has boosted participants’ confidence,
enabling them ‘to volunteer for environmental protection groups’ (Volun-
teer 3). Inference from research responses demonstrates that Envirolution
holds great potential for collaboration between multiple organisations and
groups. This sharing of learning with others is inherent to the reflex-
ivity and action with Freire’s articulation of praxis. Effectively engaging
large numbers of people in this manner can be of great value for local
councils or national governments as part of action plans towards climate
change mitigation and resilience strategies. So why are similar events
not happening all over the UK? Or indeed the world? ‘I don’t know
of another grassroots organisation like Envirolution. I would love to
4 THE ENVIROLUTION REVOLUTION … 45
see initiatives like this in other cities and towns across the UK’ (Stall-
holder 1). As a volunteer-led organisation, Envirolution organisers only
have so much capacity and putting on large engagement events provides
the team with plenty to do already. But this raises interesting questions
about how this method of engagement could be improved or expanded
in collaboration with strategic stakeholders and policymakers.
We are no longer individual persons, each struggling alone to survive the
whims of nature. Increasingly, we share the same fate. (Stallholder 12)
Community Engagement
I fear it is too little too late for this world… I hope the majority realise
we have to act fast and not leave the responsibility to a select few, it’s
everyone’s problem! (Volunteer 9)
80% of attendees surveyed stated that Envirolution ‘heightens aware-
ness of environmental issues and promotes community spirit’. Of the
stallholders surveyed, 75% said they were able to engage with a wider
audience by participating in Envirolution. However, as stated the capacity
of volunteer-led groups like Envirolution to be able to engage more
people is limited. Project volunteers acknowledge the need to engage
more participants from local religious centres, schools and other commu-
nity groups in the lead up to events. With more support from local
councils and other stakeholders increasing capacity, significantly greater
levels of impact with a wider audience could be achieved.
Conclusion and Recommendations
My fears are that we are too late to repair a lot of the damage our way of
life has caused to our home world, and that history will not look kindly
on this time. My hopes are that enough people respond to this emergency
before much more damage can be done, and this results in us creating
a more balanced and fairer society for all which values the natural world.
(Volunteer 4)
The research of these methods of public engagement shows the abundant
potential they hold in creating greater awareness of climate change and
46 B. WALLEY ET AL.
a ‘growing understanding that social and environmental issues are inter-
connected and require a whole society approach’ (Head, 2005). Groups
like Envirolution can undoubtedly help this transformational learning
process. The effective evaluation of the project was both timely and crucial
for better understanding of why people engage with Envirolution, and
therefore climate change, identifying motives and perceptions that can
inform other approaches to climate change education and engagement.
This research certainly shows Envirolution and similar events can act as
gateways for people to try and make sense of the climate emergency that
is upon us and find a proactive way of responding. Project volunteers
hope that by engaging individuals to become part of other groups and
organisations, participants can begin to understand the necessity of collab-
orative responses and the valuable roles they can play as part of a global
movement at a local level.
However, as can happen all too often in climate change education,
collective action for change is not followed through to its greatest poten-
tial, and practice remains contextualised in the immediate, local and
specific without making critical connections with the structural roots of
what Freire would call the ‘oppression’, from which inequalities emanate.
This can result in a fixation on symptoms, leaving the root causes free
to perpetuate oppressions. ‘We debate responsibilities over rights, as the
responsibility for an unjust system is turned upon the victims of that
injustice and the radical discourse of social justice is subtly absorbed and
distorted into a rhetoric of self-help’ (Ledwith, 2007). This can be seen
in government carbon reduction campaigns across the world, focused on
directing the population to reduce their personal carbon footprint whilst
still buying into the global market and only being given mainstream retail,
food and transport options that remain heavily carbon intensive.
We need to situate our local practices within the bigger political picture
to identify the way that structural oppressions get acted out in local
contexts. A participatory process, one based on true democracy, aims
to give autonomy and power to the voices of subordinated groups,
accepting that there are many truths, rather than one universal truth or
answer. As poorer countries in the Global South hold the least respon-
sibility for accelerating climate change but already experience the worst
consequences, this aim is now more important than ever. Freirean praxis
informed approaches can elevate the diversity of human experience over
the imperative of economic ‘progress’, locating social and environmental
justice at its heart, whilst mobilising collective action for social change
4 THE ENVIROLUTION REVOLUTION … 47
as its outcome. By combining praxis and critical consciousness focused
social movements like Envirolution with wider political climate change
mitigation and adaption targets, it becomes possible to create combined
and informed responses to the climate emergency, which can be commu-
nicated and facilitated with large groups of the population. The urgency
represented by possible socio-ecological collapse calls for more informed
and combined responses between individuals and groups at all levels
of society, promoting critical consciousness, and a culture of praxis and
reflection towards positive action.
The evaluation report findings and more information about Envirolu-
tion can be found on the website at: www.envirolution.org.uk.
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(2021). Envirolution Impact Report. Available at: http://envirolution.
org.uk/. Accessed 9 January 2021.
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage.
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Freire, P. (1996 Edition). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.).
Herder.
Geiger, N., & Swim, J. K. (2016). Climate of silence: Pluralistic ignorance as a
barrier to climate change discussion. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 47,
79–90.
Head, B. W. (2005). Community engagement—Explanations, limits and impacts.
In D. Gardiner & K. Scott (Eds.), Proceeding of international conference on
engaging communities. Queensland Department of Main Roads.
Ledwith, M. (2007). On being critical: Uniting theory and practice through
emancipatory action research. Educational Action Research, 15 (4), 597–611.
Lee, S. Y., Petrick, J. F., & Crompton, J. (2007). The roles of quality and inter-
mediary constructs in determining festival attendees’ behavioural intention.
Journal of Travel Research, 45(4), 10–14.
Roeser, S. (2012). Risk communication, public engagement, and climate change:
A role for emotions. Risk Analysis, 32(4), 1033–1040.
Slevin, A., et al. (2020). Lessons from Freire: Towards a pedagogy for socio-
ecological transformation. The Adult Learner, pp. 73–95.
Verlie, B. (2019). Bearing worlds: Learning to live-with climate change. Envi-
ronmental Education Research, 25(5), 751–766.
48 B. WALLEY ET AL.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
PART II
The Spaces of Local Climate Action
CHAPTER 5
How Have Climate Emergency Declarations
Helped Local Government Action
to Decarbonise?
James Dyson and Calum Harvey-Scholes
Highlights Commitments within local government CEDs chart a course
for faster community-level decarbonisation with participatory democracy.
To move forward faster, local approaches must be equitable, coordinated
and sufficiently resourced and empowered.
Keywords Climate emergency declarations ·Framing ·Enabling
environment ·Engagement ·Ambition ·Local government
J. Dyson (B)
Grantham Research Institute, LSE, London, UK
Shoreham-By-Sea, Ricardo, UK
London School of Economics, London, UK
C. Harvey-Scholes
Energy Policy Group, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Penryn, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_5
51
52 J. DYSON AND C. HARVEY-SCHOLES
Introduction
The reduction of carbon emissions is urgently needed to avoid climate
breakdown and local government has a critical role in delivering it (CCC,
2020a). Local governments can lead and coordinate climate action, estab-
lishing a local enabling environment for emissions reduction across the
public and private sectors, and ensuring efforts are informed by mean-
ingful engagement with people. This chapter presents analysis of the more
than three hundred UK local governments who have now declared a ‘cli-
mate emergency’, drawing on interviews as well as the declaration texts
themselves. This chapter discusses whether the emergency rhetoric and
declarations have accelerated policy change, how they may affect the
role of local government in decarbonisation, and what could help local
governments reduce emissions faster.
The Role of Local Climate Governance in the UK
The importance of the role of local government in achieving the UK’s
goal of an ambitious 63% reduction in carbon emissions compared to
2019 levels by 2035 is increasingly recognised (Amundsen et al., 2018;
BEIS, 2020; CCC, 2020b). However, the past decade of austerity has
seen central government funding for local government halve, meaning
a 27% real terms reduction in spending power (National Audit Office,
April 2019). In addition, the withdrawal of the National Reporting
Framework for local government in 2011, which included environmental
metrics, has weakened local government’s ability to address the low
carbon agenda (Dixon & Wilson, 2013). Consequent reductions in envi-
ronmental policy capacity in UK local governments (Eckersley & Tobin,
2019) have resulted in considerable variation in activity to implement
sustainable energy systems across the country (Britton, 2018; Tingey
& Webb, 2020). Finances and limitations to political authority both
constrain local governments’ capacity for action, and overcoming current
circumstances has required innovation from local governments (Kuzemko
& Britton, 2020).
The Growth of Local Climate Action
Despite these challenges, the past two years have seen a groundswell in
local climate action around the UK and many local governments have
5 HOW HAVE CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATIONS … 53
shown real ambition to accelerate the UK’s journey to net-zero. 2019
saw interest in and concern for climate change among the UK public
reach their highest in decades (Skinner, 2019; UNDP and University of
Oxford, 2021). Climate Emergency Declarations (CEDs) have now been
passed by the majority of UK Tier 1 and 2 local governments (such as
borough or county councils, unitary authorities and district councils), in
many cases influenced by supportive civil society and resident groups.
These can be used as an indicator to map the short-term local govern-
ment policy response to this grassroots movement for climate action, as
shown in Fig. 5.1.
Local government CEDs have contributed to normalising a new, more
urgent ‘frame’ for climate change. The declarations redefine climate
change from a technical challenge to a narrative which leverages the
most recent climate science to emphasise an urgent ‘climate emergency’
in need of rapid redress. CEDs also emphasise the human consequences
of failing to address climate change, stressing the moral responsibility of
local government to act. The changing climate is already making life more
challenging for people living in vulnerable regions, including small holder
farmers (Harvey et al., 2018) and small island states (Monioudi et al.,
2018), whilst the threat of runaway climate change is causing an inten-
sifying cognitive burden for younger generations (Clayton, 2020). These
ideas are visible in the CED texts. In making these declarations, local
Fig. 5.1 CEDs by month, October 2018 to August 2020 with key events
54 J. DYSON AND C. HARVEY-SCHOLES
governments have helped to normalise the urgency of the problem and
(re)positioned themselves as centrally engaged in tackling it.
The majority of UK local government CEDs had a focus on climate
mitigation and were substantiated with ambitious net-zero targets and
commitments to take the steps needed to reach those targets. Further-
more, most declarations and plans made public participation, often
involving young people, a core aspect of devising their routes to net zero
(Grantham Institute, 2021). In the year or so that has followed the CEDs,
progress on the commitments includes (as of January 2021) 225 of 404
UK local governments having produced new climate action plans to reach
net-zero targets. Two-thirds of these aim for a net-zero target ahead of
the government’s 2050 target (a large number of these aim for 2030).
The arguments presented in the rest of this short chapter are based
on the outcomes of the authors’ research projects1which analysed the
content of over 300 UK CED texts and supplemented this with a macro-
analysis of every local government’s climate ambitions as of 2020. In
addition, 48 councillors, council officers and local residents from 26 UK
local authorities across England and Scotland were interviewed between
July 2019 and July 2020 on how they viewed the role to be played by
these declarations. Analysis of this broad set of data provides insights into
the nature of the CEDs as well as the social and policy environment in
which they emerged.
An ‘Enabling Environment’
for Local Emissions Reduction
Charting a Course: Motivation, Direction-Setting, and Targets
We argue that the CEDs have prompted local government, to varying
degrees, to establish conditions which encourage and enable local carbon
emissions reductions. As one council employee observed, ‘It’s definitely
stepped everything up …. And we needed it really […] because it would
have been business as usual’. Through gearing internal processes to deliver
plans and achieve ambitious targets, utilising governmental policy and
authority and facilitating public engagement and participation, whilst not
1Research was part of an MSc thesis, ESRC-funded PCAN work and the EPSRC-
funded IGov project.
5 HOW HAVE CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATIONS … 55
comprehensive, local authorities can be seen to be creating an ‘enabling
environment’ (Bulkeley & Kern, 2006).
Elected officials and officers in local government expressed the feeling
that the declarations empowered the councils to take action—showing
people within councils that they could control their own futures and
decisions on this issue. Councillors, local government officers and civil
society members spoken to, believe the declarations have been effective
tools to add formality and legitimacy to the need and mandate for faster
action, making climate ‘more of a mainstream issue that everyone has to
think about’. The declarations disrupted the social fabric of local govern-
ments, raising the profile of the issue and empowering officials to act.
This empowerment has enabled newly ambitious climate strategies, such
as creating an action plan, ensuring appropriate and effective governance,
and monitoring progress. Of course, whilst these foundational steps repre-
sent an advance on the status quo, their translation into practice and the
acceleration of decarbonisation will ultimately determine success.
In addition, many CEDs directly committed local governments to
institutional reforms: such as, establishing climate responsibilities in
Cabinet and other committees, adding a climate impact assessment to
their decision-making processes, ensuring strategic policy alignment with
zero carbon and running local engagement forums. For example, Manch-
ester City Council have introduced a 10% weight for climate change in
their decision-making framework (CCC, 2020a). Looking to influence
building development in the wider area, others have begun a review of
their Local Plan in order to align it with their CED (e.g. Basingstoke
& Deane Borough Council, Cotswolds District Council, and Stafford
Borough Council). Overall, normalising and formalising the climate
emergency within local government processes and activity, as well as regu-
lating and steering others, provides a clarity of purpose and a shared
trajectory for emissions reduction.
Public Engagement: Consent and Accountability
Civil society has played a role in elevating climate on the policy agenda
and promoting the climate emergency frame—consider the widely-
publicised Extinction Rebellion occupations, the Fridays for Future school
strikes and Greta Thunberg’s blunt candour in addressing those in
authority. More directly, we have observed residents’ groups initiating
56 J. DYSON AND C. HARVEY-SCHOLES
the CED process and frequently collaborating with elected officials,
encouraging them to raise motions and demonstrating public support.
The CEDs commit to engage with the community, often with young
people specifically; some invoke youth parliaments and at least 18 have
already carried out citizens’ assemblies. Deliberative engagement exercises
such as citizens’ assemblies and juries have emerged as a newly promi-
nent feature in policy development—examples include Camden Borough
Council, Kendal Town Council and Oxford City Council. Increasing
deliberative exchange between civil society and policymakers has the
potential to establish a social mandate for action and engage new social
groups in local climate action (Howarth et al., 2020). The way the council
reached out to citizens ahead of declaring a climate emergency suggests
how CEDs involved new people and politicians in local climate action. As
described by one resident:
Jane’s name was pulled out. She wasn’t initially a climate activist and was
more kind of from a strong trade union background. She spoke to a lot of
people in her ward that had started to do work on the climate crisis.
Effective publicity of these (arcane and novel) processes is important for
public buy-in as well as an opportunity for raising awareness of the climate
issue more widely.
There are early, promising signs that the increased engagement
between civil society and policymakers can continue, with citizens moni-
toring policy progress and expressing their (dis)approval. In an early
example of ongoing engagement, Bury Council received sharp criticism
in early 2020 for not making good on the promises made in their CED,
leading the council to revise their budget. Ongoing accountability will
partly depend on the extent to which local civil society organisations hold
their elected officials to account.
Moving Forward Faster
Declaring a climate emergency signals a direction of travel and, in many
cases, indicates the required speed. Progress requires practical policy to
drive carbon emissions reduction. Pushing the metaphor a little further,
in order to arrive in time, action must accelerate—the current cruise
control simply will not get us to the destination in time to avoid catas-
trophic heating (UNEP, 2020). As we have seen, preliminary activity has
5 HOW HAVE CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATIONS … 57
prepared an environment for action within institutions and, importantly,
begun engagement with businesses and residents to co-create solutions
and aspirations. In order to deliver faster progress, local governments may
explore a more active role in certain areas (Britton, 2018). For example,
local governments have led the development of district heat networks
for decades in the UK (e.g. Sheffield City Council, Islington Borough,
Gateshead Council) and successful municipal local transport provision
persists (e.g. Lothian Buses, Reading Buses), with the idea being consid-
ered elsewhere (e.g. Cornwall). Bristol City Council’s Bristol City Leap
project aims to leverage private sector investment to deliver a city-scale
low-carbon energy transformation programme. Given that many of the
technological solutions are already at commercial scale, if the CEDs are
interpreted as a genuine ambition to enact transformative policy, then
the challenges local government faces in achieving the demanding rate of
emissions reduction required by the science are primarily social, practical
and political. More specifically, on the basis of our research, we identify
three requirements for accelerating emissions reduction: public buy-in to
policy and the wider agenda, coordination between and across scales to
deliver on commitments, and the power and investment to act. We now
briefly consider each of these in turn.
The Limits to the Emergency Frame
In order to include all groups in climate discussion and decision-making,
public engagement communications must be tailored and often expressly
related to diverse social, financial, and other local circumstances, as well
as environmental benefits.
Our research identified a concern that ‘climate emergency’ may not
be an engaging frame for people who are from socially and econom-
ically marginalised groups. For some people, declaring an emergency
for climate change seems irrelevant or even marginalises the everyday
emergencies that they experience. For those experiencing daily hard-
ship such as precarious income, chronic illness or unstable housing,
being able to treat climate change as an emergency may be inconceiv-
able. Reducing inequality and poverty must be a core ambition within
climate action strategies. The challenge of decarbonisation presents many
opportunities to tackle both issues, simultaneously reducing hardship and
carbon emissions, including retrofitting homes and reducing car traffic
(MacNaughton et al., 2018; Sharifi, 2021).
58 J. DYSON AND C. HARVEY-SCHOLES
Coordinating Action
A combination of central coordination and local collaboration will be essen-
tial to meeting ambitious emissions reductions targets. Coordination across
local governments is both challenging (Clar, 2019) and vital to achieving
the goals set out in the CEDs (Bulkeley & Kern, 2006; CCC, 2020a).
Between local governments, devolved regions and the national govern-
ments, net-zero targets vary significantly; these varying aspirations are
likely to cause challenges for coordinating action between local govern-
ments as well as with national government. A balance between local
autonomy and central governance will help in areas such as energy system
transformation (Willis et al.,2019). Evidence of innovative solutions is
emerging; for instance, the Devon Climate Response Group aims to
bring actors across the county together under a common net-zero vision
and coordinated action plan. Local partnerships are forming, with the
aim to coordinate climate action among businesses and communities,
such as the Place-Based Climate Action Network (PCAN) commissions.
Research and demonstrations to enhance our understanding of effective
coordination across governmental scales, energy vectors and sectors are
needed.
The Available Power and Resource for Local Government
Some local governments may partly overcome resource constraints, but fulfil-
ment of ambitious CED commitments across the board will be expedited by
financial support and devolution of powers from central government. An
appeal to central government to provide the power and resource required
to deliver on commitments is a common feature among the CEDs.
Though policy to enable local action has been promised by the govern-
ment (Hansard, 2019), delivering this will require both clear strategic
direction-setting from Whitehall at the same time as providing autonomy
to implement appropriate local solutions through powers and finance.
Nonetheless, innovative local governments are finding ways to finance
action in the absence of directly supportive central government policy: for
example, Warrington and West Berkshire councils became the first coun-
cils to successfully lever low-cost private finance for renewable generation
projects using ‘green bonds’ (WBC, 2021). Warwick Council, meanwhile,
has announced a referendum asking residents whether they would accept
increased council tax to fund climate action.
5 HOW HAVE CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATIONS … 59
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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CHAPTER 6
Developing a Carbon Baseline to Support
Multi-Stakeholder, Multi-Level Climate
Governance at County Level
Erica Russell and Ian Christie
Highlights Orchestration requires political commitment and engage-
ment on the basis of evidence, knowledge and progress-checking. Local
actors face challenges in compiling carbon baselines that offer useful
production and consumption emissions.
Keywords County ·Baseline ·Carbon emissions
The Importance of Local Baseline Data
There is widespread acceptance that top-down approaches to climate
change, identified with the Kyoto Protocol (Jordan et al., 2018, p.4),
are no longer sufficient to drive climate action. International bodies,
E. Russell (B)·I. Christie
Centre for Environment and Sustainability (CES), University of Surrey,
Guildford, UK
e-mail: erica.russell@surrey.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_6
63
64 E. RUSSELL AND I. CHRISTIE
such as the UN, are seen as providing global direction, but with the
Paris Agreement came an acceptance that implementation based on ‘real
world’ experimentation required greater action by state, sub-state and
non-state organisations (Oberthür, 2016). This shift in thinking has
seen increased debate about effective governance forms: those focused
on mutually interdependent national and sub-national actors; the multi-
level governance approach first identified by Hooghe and Marks (1996);
and the related concept of polycentricity, which focuses on local leader-
ship through self-coordinating groups, often as part of wider networks
(Ostrom, 2014; Backstrand et al., 2018). Increasingly, a need for both
approaches has been cited, as capacity, resources and reach need to be
shared (Newell et al., 2012). It is within a context of frequently ‘unco-
ordinated’ sub-national action (Bansard et al., 2017) that this chapter
considers a strategically significant issue for climate policymaking and for
‘orchestration’ of climate governance (Backstrand et al., 2018)—namely,
the difficulties of creating an effective emissions baseline suitable for local
actors to use as a basis for climate mitigation planning and implementa-
tion. Specifically, we consider the county level of local action in the UK,
focusing on Surrey, a county in England.
Establishing a Carbon Baseline for Surrey
Carbon footprinting and baselining exercises have been completed for
many cities, including several in the UK, but little research has been
undertaken at larger sub-national scales. This case study offers insights
from the carbon baseline work initiated by the Surrey Climate Commis-
sion and undertaken by the Centre for Environment and Sustainability
at the University of Surrey. (This exercise complements recent carbon
footprinting work carried out for Surrey County Council.) The Surrey
experience sheds light on issues arising in efforts to provide crucial
climate-related information for a territory that includes large urban popu-
lations, extensive suburban areas and a substantial rural population and
area. Working at the scale of a county creates both complexity and oppor-
tunities. Surrey is adjacent to London, with a population of approximately
1.2 million who live in its 26 towns, 175 villages and hamlets. The county
I. Christie
e-mail: i.christie@surrey.ac.uk
6 DEVELOPING A CARBON BASELINE … 65
comprises large areas of downland and sandy heath, and is highly wooded
(22% of area), and farming tends to be extensive.
Surrey is administered through multiple tiers: a county council, 11
borough and district councils, and more than 80 parish and town coun-
cils and is part of two wider sub-regional Local Enterprise Partnerships.
Surrey also has strong advocacy groups, with over 50 organisations
involved in environmental or climate activities (Street, 2020). Whilst
this degree of institutional richness may be a local strength, supporting
both multi-level and polycentric approaches to climate governance, risks
arise. Without a clear vision for coordination and long-term planning,
such a plethora of actors can result in confused responsibility and
reduced impact in environmental and climate policy (Newell, Pattberg
& Schroeder, 2012). This complexity poses challenges in carbon baseline
studies distinct from those arising for cities.
Drawing together this diversity of actors and county attributes, the
Surrey Climate Commission provided a leadership role, acting as both
the initiator and an independent actor (Homsy & Warner, 2015)in
requiring a baseline study. Accepting that limited information results in
poorly targeted climate action plans (Boehnke et al., 2019; Lehtonen
&Kern,2009), a local and relevant emissions baseline was seen as crit-
ical for highlighting carbon ‘hotspots’. Failure to overcome deficiencies
in localised data and action planning was also identified as restricting
the development of best practice (Boehnke et al., 2019). As a result of
these constraints, there is little evidence that increased capacity for local
climate action has resulted in actual reductions in local carbon emissions
(Hoppe et al., 2016), a situation the Surrey Climate Commission wanted
to address.
With political and financial limitations in mind, a primary aim of the
baseline research was to use readily accessible publicly available data that
would allow for ease of ongoing monitoring at little additional cost or
expertise. Where possible, the research utilised sub-national emissions
datasets (BEIS, 2020b) to provide quality assurance and to align with the
local authority reporting frameworks. Working at the county scale, the
baseline had to consider land use, with its potential for carbon capture,
high levels of variation in district profiles, both physical and population
based, and in the case of Surrey, the impact of London commuting and
wealth transfer. Key to the engagement of local actors was the provi-
sion of a baseline carbon footprint that offers this nuanced understanding
of place, local issues and interest group alignment. Whilst local climate
66 E. RUSSELL AND I. CHRISTIE
action by public bodies has focused primarily on territorial emissions, the
Surrey Climate Commission’s members made it clear, through a process
of consultation, that the baseline work must additionally incorporate and
highlight the impacts of consumption as well as of local emissions from
production.
Issues Encountered in Creating
a Useful County-Scale Baseline
The Surrey Climate Commission baseline research project has identified
several issues in creating county-scale baselines that we expect would
face similar county or sub-regional level work. Most importantly, national
datasets, even those available at a sub-national level, are based on interna-
tional emissions reporting commitments and national government policy
needs. It is clear that multiple reporting formats have created discrete
UK carbon datasets. Some of these are spatially separated, and others use
different methodologies, data and extensive modelling to provide insight
into specific sectors or issues. Even direct energy use data lack gran-
ularity, with BEIS acknowledging that an annual spend threshold may
mean a misallocation of up to 2 million small businesses as domestic
users (NAEI, 2020).Informationisalsoheldindifferentmeasurement
units and carbon formats. Such variation in methodologies makes direct
comparison difficult.
UK Sub-National Consumption statistics (BEIS, 2019b) provide emis-
sions data for four fuel categories: electricity, gas, other heating fuels
and transport fuel, allocated across three territorial categories: domestic,
industrial/commercial and transport. Additionally, they provide data on
land use, for both carbon emissions and sequestration. All emissions are
supplied in units of CO2and are available at both county and district
levels. This information provides a useful guide to county-based carbon
hotspots. However, the UK Carbon Footprint (DEFRA, 2019), based on
models using value flows, is currently only available at a national level.
Addressing Baseline Limitations
To overcome the disconnect between this top-down data availability and
the types of information needed to support practical, local action, the
researchers worked with the Surrey Climate Commission to identify key
areas to expand as part of the Surrey baseline:
6 DEVELOPING A CARBON BASELINE … 67
1. Enhanced spatial and use detail of people’s homes and Surrey travel;
2. Identify the local impact of business and the public estate;
3. Increase understanding of the land and its role in carbon sequestra-
tion;
4. Estimate the size of the county’s carbon footprint.
In doing this, an important principle was established: namely, that with
increased granularity came a coarsening of the data, but that this trade-off
was acceptable if it provided richer insight, supported proportionality of
response, identified gaps and made visible unseen issues. The following
sections provide examples of this work.
Creating Richer Insight
The highest territorial emissions in Surrey are associated with transport
and travel (50.2%). Sub-regional data (BEIS, 2020b) confirm that traffic
on Surrey’s A-roads and motorways generate the greatest emissions, but
provide no detail on what types of vehicles are creating the emissions—or
why the vehicles are being driven. The most detailed information on work
patterns and commuting at an individual level is the Census dataset. Using
this, it was possible to understand local work and commuting patterns by
distance and transport type, albeit with the caveat that this information
is now dated. The data are even less reliable as a guide to the future as a
result of COVID-19, which has expedited changes in shopping patterns
and an increase in working from home, shifts which are unlikely to be
completely reversed after the virus effect is overcome. Car usage was the
primary generator of emissions on all types of roads, creating between 52
and 70% of Surrey districts’ transport emissions. Combining ‘reason to
travel’ national survey data (DfT, 2018) with calculated Surrey car emis-
sions enabled a crude allocation of Surrey resident travel. This suggested
that whilst home working could reduce commuting-related emissions,
up to 33% of car-based emissions were generated in visiting friends and
family. Here, reduction may require low carbon travel alternatives.
As noted earlier, information on domestic electricity and gas emissions
is available at a tier 2 level but additional work using domestic Energy
Performance Certificate (EPC) data (MHCLG, 2019) provided a more
nuanced guide to the types of homes in each district and average emis-
sions. This analysis indicated a strong correlation between house size,
affluence and higher emissions usage. Whilst many councils have focused
68 E. RUSSELL AND I. CHRISTIE
on the social co-benefits achieved by supporting those in fuel poverty,
this work identifies that there is an ongoing need to promote behavioural
change among those citizens most able to afford carbon reduction.
Offering Perspective on the Scale of Emissions
Many public bodies have taken on a leadership role in decarbonisation
in their own estate, promoting energy demand reduction, testing new
technologies at scale or undertaking large exemplar renewable projects.
It is important that local actors have a realistic perspective on the direct
impact such activity can have at a county level. This is difficult, as BEIS
sub-national data do not differentiate public sector emissions from those
of industry and commerce. Our attempts to estimate county emissions
from the public sector, using locally available data for Surrey, were only
partially successful. Whilst the County Council, the University of Surrey
and NHS primary healthcare sites could provide annual emissions data,
those for district councils were incomplete; and information on emissions
from secondary healthcare sites was extremely limited. We concluded that
the public sector accounted for around 2% of the county’s total emis-
sions, although it is likely that this is an underestimation. It is, however,
in line with published UK national public sector emission estimates (BEIS,
2020a).
For local organisations wanting to drive change within industry and
commerce (19.3% of Surrey CO2emissions), where and why these
emissions occur remains a difficult question to answer. Whilst ONS sub-
national data include energy and travel emissions for the agricultural
sector, ONS offers no granularity for other sectors. To overcome this,
our baseline work drew together national business emissions for both
CO2and CO2ebysector(ONS,2019a), national business numbers
by sector (BEIS, 2019a) and numbers of businesses by sector in Surrey
(ONS, 2019b). Carbon dioxide emission data suggest that manufacturing
businesses create the highest sectoral emissions (45%) across all but one
of the county’s districts, whilst the logistics sector (22.6%) is significant
in one of the districts. The baseline study also reviewed industry CO2e
emissions: here it seems that there is considerable under-reporting of
emissions within agriculture, forestry and fishing, and more substantially
in the manufacturing sector, where more than 80% of emissions identified
are derived from gases other than CO2. Other sectors are less affected,
appearing to emit around 90% of their carbon as CO2.
6 DEVELOPING A CARBON BASELINE … 69
Identifying Gaps
In 2018, ONS data confirmed that Surrey land acts as a carbon sink.
Expanded information available at a local authority level now provides
positive and negative emissions from four types of land use (BEIS,
2020b). This offers increased granularity of data on carbon sequestra-
tion due to local land use change, indicating the benefit of increasing
woodland, peat wetlands and grassland. However, the dataset only enables
high level monitoring of land use change, which limits the use of data
in informing strategy and driving action. This gap is being investigated
further.
Making Hidden Impacts Visible
To understand the ‘hidden’ carbon impact of products and services
bought by those living and working in Surrey, the research attempted
to allocate national footprint data. Simple pro-rata allocation by popula-
tion size did not allow for the impact of affluence, an issue highlighted
in the Surrey homes data, which would result in an underestimation of
consumption emissions. Therefore, we adapted and updated the work of
Minx et al. (2013), who combined both MRIO data with information on
a variety of metrics linked to affluence: this approach suggests a carbon
footprint of 16,898 ktCO2. Whilst a relatively crude allocation, this would
certainly suggest that Surrey’s overall carbon footprint, combining the
production and consumption perspective, is at least twice the size of the
territorial emissions.
Conclusion
With an acceptance that climate change action is a responsibility of all, we
argue that polycentric approaches need to be underpinned by knowledge
at all levels. The challenges of place-based climate action at local levels in
the UK and beyond are multifaceted, and effective action depends on a
good base of knowledge to help decision-makers navigate the complexity.
Whilst there is much to welcome in ground-up action, we suggest that a
level of orchestration is required. National datasets need to be improved
as indicated in our earlier discussion. But a crucial additional task for
central government with actors at sub-national scale is to ensure that
national data are complemented by adequate resources to enable local
70 E. RUSSELL AND I. CHRISTIE
authorities and their partners to establish and update datasets on sectoral
emissions at city, county and district/borough level. We suggest too that
work needs to be done on development and take-up of a standard set
of carbon mapping tools and metrics at local scales, to enable compar-
isons, collaborations and information exchange between actors in climate
governance at local and regional levels. Finally, urgent work is needed
on measuring progress in reducing emissions from consumption. Given
the extent of diversity and inequality in local economic and social condi-
tions, we suggest there is great value in locating that work primarily at
local levels. We recommend that central government equip a variety of
local authorities to act as centres of excellence in mapping and measuring
progress in reductions in lifestyle-based emissions (these areas could well
be drawn from those that have set up PCAN Climate Commissions).
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ons-national-statistics-2005-to-2018
Boehnke, R. F., et al. (2019). Good practices in local climate mitigation action
by small and medium-sized cities; exploring meaning, implementation and
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linkage to actual lowering of carbon emissions in thirteen municipalities in
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
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The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 7
Power in Practice: Reflecting on the First year
of the Edinburgh Climate Commission
Rosanna Harvey-Crawford and Alice Creasy
Highlights Insiders’ perspectives on the first year of the Edinburgh
Climate Commission. Innovative governance, or the reproduction of
existing power structures?
Keywords Local governance ·Climate change ·Cities ·Net-zero ·
Power ·Ethnography
Introduction
Surfing a wave of place-based urban governance, the creation of Climate
Commissions through the Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN)
reflects an increasing focus on cities as ‘strategic sites’ for experimental
R. Harvey-Crawford (B)·A. Creasy
School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: r.e.harvey-crawford@ed.ac.uk
A. Creasy
e-mail: alice.creasy@ed.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_7
73
74 R. HARVEY-CRAWFORD AND A. CREASY
climate governance (Broto, 2019). The creation of these Commissions
under the broad umbrella of ‘PCAN’, however, means that these new
groups are caught up in a complex, multi-scalar and fast-evolving land-
scape which connects the messy and lived experiences at ‘the local’ to
a much broader network of actors and institutions across the country,
and across the world. It is this a tangled landscape that those charged
with ‘setting up’ these place-based Commissions must try, not only to
interoperate, but to work within.
This chapter reflects on the first year of the Edinburgh Climate
Commission: from the ‘setting up’ process in Autumn/Winter 2019 to
November 2020 when the Commissioners were looking forward to the
next phase of their 2020 workplan. This period marks a unique part of
the Commission’s history as stakeholders grapple with a dynamic land-
scape, attempting not only to define the role of the Commission but
conceptualise and represent the ‘place’ in which it exists. In grappling
with these questions, there exists an opportunity to develop a mode of
climate governance which combines the input of ‘organic intellectuals’,
whose knowledge is grounded in everyday experiences and working-class
life, alongside ‘traditional intellectuals’, whose knowledge is grounded in
formal expertise (Gramsci, 1971). This mixing of formal and informal
knowledges and experiences sparks more inclusive climate actions through
an articulation of knowledge that is place-based and culturally inclusive
(Rice et al., 2015).
Written from the perspective of two junior, female members of the
team charged with setting up the Commission, this chapter will be a
personal, reflexive account of our experiences on the project as passionate
environmentalists eager to become involved with local climate action in
practice. Through two themes, ‘The Carbon City’ and ‘Project Power
Relations’, we reflect on how power dynamics, from the personal to the
international scale, have influenced the representation of place through
the Edinburgh Climate Commission. Importantly, these themes articulate
barriers to building a climate ‘praxis’ (Rice et al., 2015) and demon-
strate how decisions made in the setting up phase are vitally important
for shaping a Commission’s future.
Background & Methodology
The Edinburgh Commission was formally established in March 2020 at
the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we (the authors of this
7 POWER IN PRACTICE: REFLECTING … 75
chapter) had been part of the team working behind the scenes on the
project since August 2019. This team was made up of small group of
Council and University of Edinburgh staff including three core members
who occupied senior roles at their respective organisations. As a recent
MSc graduate and a part-time MSc student halfway through her degree,
we came to the project as junior members of the team. We are both Edin-
burgh residents and passionate environmentalists and were excited about
working on an innovative project related to the city’s recent Climate
Emergency declaration and pledge to be Net Zero by 2030. Rosanna
was tasked with the more day-to-day ‘doing’ in the project—administra-
tive tasks and attending meetings—whilst Alice was providing research
support to inform the shape and structure of the Commission based on
evidence from local climate action initiatives taking place elsewhere.
This chapter’s contribution is based on ethnographic diaries kept by
both authors since August 2019. Ethnographic research methods can
be defined simply as the process of the researcher immersing themselves
in the research setting: observing events, participating in conversations,
examining speech for underlying assumptions and recording observations
in a field diary (de Volo & Schatz, 2004). Although first used in research
projects on ‘traditional communities’, the benefits of using ethnography
to ‘study up’ have since been noted (Wolf, 2018). Project, or participant,
ethnography has been used by researchers embedded in projects or insti-
tutions to better understand how policy is produced and how projects
are implemented. It is emphasised that ‘ethnographies must engage with
the concept of ‘power’, paying attention to whose voices, interests and
ideas come to dominate within projects at different times and why’ (Evans
&Lambert,2008; Lewis et al., 2003). With this in mind, this chapter
will reflect on the power dynamics of establishing the Edinburgh Climate
Commission and on the dominant voices, ideas and interests that have
persisted both before and after the Commission’s launch.
The Carbon City
The concept of a Climate Commission is a relatively new one and, until
the expansion of the PCAN project in 2019, a practice that was firmly
rooted in the geography of Leeds. As PCAN grew to encompass two
more cities in late 2019, coordinators looked around for mobile pieces of
policy, research and best practice that could be applied to the development
of Commissions in different places. In Edinburgh, faced with not only a
76 R. HARVEY-CRAWFORD AND A. CREASY
blank slate but a self-conscious pressure to get the Commission ‘set up’
and to work with the City Council, stakeholders leaned heavily on a piece
of work called the Carbon Roadmap to guide the practical development
of the Commission and its approach to climate change in the city. This
piece of work would become integral to the development and focus of
the Commission.
The Carbon Roadmap presents a carbon accounting methodology
which allows researchers to develop emissions profiles for the city, broken
down by sector and based on carbon budgets derived from the IPCC’s
global budget divided equally across the world’s population. The Edin-
burgh iteration was aligned explicitly to the Council’s target of becoming
Net Zero by 2030. The methodology is based on the national Stern
Review (Stern, 2006) and was led by researchers in Leeds.
The first time we saw the Carbon Roadmap, we struggled to under-
stand it. It used a methodology we were unfamiliar with and presented
a way of approaching climate action that we had not come across during
our social science degrees. It was intimidating to see climate change in
Edinburgh (a topic we thought we had a good grasp of) reduced to a set
of numbers and sectors. While we could understand the high-level inten-
tions of the Carbon Roadmap—technical interventions for Edinburgh to
reach Net Zero—the numbers were completely inaccessible to us. The
universal acceptance of this approach and its dominance across the climate
change narratives being formed through the Commission left us feeling
intimidated and, frankly, insecure. If this was how climate action was
‘done’ in the ‘real world’, what had we been taught at university? Did this
mean what we had learnt was useless? From our perspective at the time,
embedded within this project, the power that this piece of work had over
stakeholders in the city and its unquestioning acceptance by those leading
the Commission’s development led us to assume that this was the best
way to approach climate action.
As the project evolved, the Carbon Roadmap was further cemented in
its importance as it formed the basis for the Council’s Policy and Sustain-
ability Committee’s acceptance of the Commission in November 2019.
This demonstrated the power of this carbon accounting methodology
within the city, and as a result, it became the foundation on which the
Climate Commission, and Edinburgh’s approach to climate action, was
built. From the beginning, Net Zero and the Commission have been
inseparable as concepts, with one giving purpose to the other. This focus
on emissions not only shaped the Commission’s view of climate change
7 POWER IN PRACTICE: REFLECTING … 77
as a quantitative ‘issue’ to be tackled by technical, measurable carbon
reduction efforts but, given the ‘area-based’ approach to emissions reduc-
tion being touted here, served to frame the city as a bounded geography,
raising questions as to what and whom would come to ‘count’ as Edin-
burgh. As Rice et al. (2015) observe, carbon accounting methodologies
speak to a certain way of framing the climate challenge, one that privileges
scientific and technical knowledge to produce exclusionary politics.
Choosing Commissioners
In November 2020, with the go-ahead from Councillors, our small team
was able to start considering the task of recruiting Commission members.
The goal of ‘hitting the carbon numbers’ (Hulme, 2019) propagated by
the city’s 2030 target and the Carbon Roadmap set the scene for the
type of technocratic, expert knowledge that would be chosen to repre-
sent the city on the Commission. With carbon seen as a key indicator
of success, the breakdown of city stakeholders by sector (private, public,
third) was regarded as a ‘manageable’ way of making sense of the city
and approaching the ‘challenge’ of climate change. Within these early
conversations, the ability to leverage private sector capital, set out as a
key mechanism for change in the Carbon Roadmap, became an important
focus in drawing up the Commissioner shortlist and guiding the eventual
choice of a private sector commission chair.
Instead of an application process for Commissioners, people were
handpicked to fill the small number of Commission roles. The language
around the selection of Commissioners was constrained by sectors, for
example the need to find ‘a finance representative’ or ‘a third sector
representative’. It was at this point we began to reflect considerably
on the direction this endeavour was taking and why such an approach
was deemed valid. During our Masters, we had learnt about the funda-
mental role of social justice in addressing climate change. However, as
the Commission came together, it seemed to represent one version of
Edinburgh: affluent, middle class, professional. This approach highlighted
how different our vision for the Commission and ideas around represen-
tation were from others working on the project. To us, representation
meant the inclusion of different and diverse voices in the city, however,
this perspective failed to chime with the pursuit of climate ‘expertise’,
deemed necessary to tackle Edinburgh’s emissions profile.
78 R. HARVEY-CRAWFORD AND A. CREASY
CO2has become the politically mainstream way of ‘knowing’ climate
change. Swyngedouw (2010, pp. 219–220) has called it the ‘thing’
around which our ‘environmental dreams, aspirations, contestations as
well as policies crystallise’. Rice et al., (2015, p. 255), meanwhile, have
also observed how scientific knowledge has come to dominate polit-
ical discourse, noting how ‘the corresponding community of technical
experts that is called into importance provides a narrow pathway of under-
standing and action that is not sufficient to produce change because
of its exclusionary politics’. In Edinburgh, the Carbon Roadmap func-
tioned as a way of upholding a certain way of knowing climate change
and climate action, predicated on mitigation activities grounded in lever-
aging finance. Through the selection of Commissioners, guided by the
Carbon Roadmap, the benefits of including alternative and diverse voices
were overlooked, thereby limiting the possibility of building an inclusive
route to impact. Our experiences in Edinburgh thus illustrate just how
powerful the narratives described by Swyngedouw and Rice (above) are in
practice. Not only does carbon drive environmental policy-making (Kenis
& Lievens, 2017), but it is also capable of dominating efforts to create
new institutions for climate action.
Project Power Relations
Creating a Workplan
Due to growing pressure to act and announce the Commission’s
arrival in the city (further accelerated by the onset of the COVID-19
pandemic), the development and enactment of the workplan became a
very controlled, closely managed process. Rather than developing the
workplan with Commissioners, a draft was prepared by the Chair and
secretariat and presented to them for comments. At the time, it felt as
though people’s lives were being turned upside down by the pandemic
and that by presenting pre-prepared documents to the Commission, it
would ease the burden on Commissioners, all of whom are volunteers.
Beyond this, however, in these early days, there was also a sense that the
secretariat (staff at the ECCI and Council) needed to maintain control of
the potentially messy and unpredictable Commission in order to deliver
results at pace. Consequently, the production of the workplan became
overtly administrative.
7 POWER IN PRACTICE: REFLECTING … 79
As the sole administrator in the secretariat, Rosanna embodied the
bureaucratic depoliticisation of what otherwise could have been an
exciting political co-production exercise. Over the course of a few weeks,
the Commission became a sterile, bureaucratic job that was a far cry from
the dynamic, inclusive and innovative forms of climate governance we
had learnt about in our Masters degrees. Most communication with the
Commissioners was conducted in a flurry of emails and attached docu-
ments. It was clear that the Net Zero target and the Carbon Roadmap
were seen as sufficient to guide the work of the Commission’s first year,
thereby preventing a Commission-wide conversation about climate action
in Edinburgh where alternative views could come to the fore. Further-
more, the urgency of this target was driving a preoccupation with speed
and impact that justified decisions being taken by a few key stakeholders
as opposed to the wider group. Thus, the creation of the Commission
(articulated through its Terms of Reference and workplan) became an
increasingly closed process. Not only had the workplan served to exclude
certain voices from the process, but it had also trapped us, as young, polit-
ically engaged and passionate climate activists, in administrative roles that
reduced climate governance to a series of bureaucratic tasks.
Proposing a Working Group
Led by the goal of Net Zero and the Carbon Roadmap, the workplan for
the Commission’s first year was focused predominantly on engaging the
private sector in Edinburgh, ‘scaling up’ action and producing a Green
Economic Recovery guide for the city. Six months later, it was notice-
able that some Commissioners were intimately involved with delivering
the workplan, whilst there was a remaining opportunity to engage others
with new ideas that more closely spoke to their skillsets. In response, we
proposed a working group that could focus on public engagement and
adaptation, two issues that up until then had received little attention. It
felt good to take ownership and initiative in order to potentially steer the
project towards climate action we felt was meaningful. Not only would
this proposed working group engage Commissioners whose knowledge
lay outside the private sector and engage organisations and individuals
not represented on the Commission, but it would help us as employees
on the project to feel empowered, useful and give us the chance to learn
new skills.
80 R. HARVEY-CRAWFORD AND A. CREASY
Although we had buy-in from several Commissioners and from
colleagues at the university, the challenge came when trying to integrate
this idea with the vision of Edinburgh City Council. A key issue since the
project’s inception was the question of resourcing. For the Commission
to deliver a demanding programme of work (outlined in the workplan), it
was necessary to have more staff than the PCAN project could fund. As a
result, most secretariat duties had been transferred to the Council, which
would also ensure continuity once the PCAN project ended. However,
resource pressure at the Council—the legacy of years of budget cuts
(Ford, 2019; Centre for Cities 2019) and the COVID-19 crisis—meant
that any unpredictability or deviation from the established workplan was
seen as an unnecessary risk or distraction.
Because the workplan was designed and guided by a select group
of individuals at an early stage, as the project evolved power remained
concentrated within that same group. We experienced this power first-
hand during discussions about our proposed working group, which
ultimately ended up being rejected. Not only had we seen this group
as an opportunity to enhance the work of the Commission in a way
which would benefit the city but also a mechanism through which to
empower individual people involved in the project (including ourselves).
This process left us feeling disempowered and highlighted the difficulty of
challenging established narratives and knowledges on how to ‘do’ climate
action. Importantly, this experience demonstrates how difficult it is for
discussions around justice, inclusivity and place-based identities to pene-
trate conversations on sector-based CO2reduction, even at the early stage
of idea formulation.
Conclusion
Sustainable cities have been touted as global climate solutions, leading the
way as national and international leaders fail to agree and implement effec-
tive climate policy (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020). With the pressure on
urban centres mounting and after decades of climate inaction, a desire to
act is both understandable and commendable. However, in an increasingly
busy and fractured governance landscape, new climate-focused organisa-
tions must grapple with the tension between urgent action, and the ethical
pitfalls of moving too fast. With this in mind, we have had a fascinating
opportunity to observe and experience what this innovative leadership
looks like ‘on the ground’ in Edinburgh.
7 POWER IN PRACTICE: REFLECTING … 81
Over the course of a year, we have seen the way in which dominant
and normative narratives of climate action as Net Zero became embedded
in the Commission’s identity before any Commissioners had even been
selected. Reflecting the global push for cities to reach Net Zero, the
Carbon Roadmap laid the foundation for ‘traditional intellectual’ knowl-
edge to guide the Climate Commission at the expense of building a
new, grassroots and organic institution, attuned to the unique histor-
ical and geographical landscape of Edinburgh—one which could embrace
the multiplicity of ways in which people can ‘know’ climate change. This
has served to foster an exclusivity that has pervaded the Commission,
engaging only those whose expertise is sufficiently useful for the carbon
city of Edinburgh.
On a personal level, our work on this project has hammered home
how difficult it is to challenge and negotiate established, mainstream
visions of the ‘sustainable city’. This has been, at times, a very emotive
and frustrating project which has tested our resilience and challenged our
knowledge about climate governance in practice. However, despite the
challenges described in this chapter, this hugely valuable professional and
personal learning experience has highlighted the ways in which involve-
ment in local climate action means wading into (and fully appreciating)
the complex power relations involved with the governance of place-based
futures. As the focus on place-based climate action intensifies, we hope
that these reflections might provide some insightful lessons for others who
find themselves in similar positions, at the confluence of urban climate
governance in theory and in practice.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 8
How Can ‘Ordinary’ Cities Become Climate
Pioneers?
Wolfgang Haupt, Peter Eckersley, and Kristine Kern
Highlights We need to highlight the climate approaches of ‘ordinary’
cities, not just the high-profile leaders. ‘Ordinary’ cities can catch up with
the leaders, even if they have only limited resources.
Keywords Climate adaptation ·Climate mitigation ·Climate
governance ·Pioneers ·Local governance ·‘Ordinary’ cities
Introduction
Most academic studies into urban climate policies have focused on large
forerunner cities, often highlighting how their ambitious and innovative
approaches aim to deliver carbon neutrality by 2050 or earlier. Although
such studies can tell a positive and inspiring story, these places often
benefit from favourable conditions, such as higher levels of capacity or
W. Ha u p t (B)·P. Eckersley ·K. Kern
Leibniz-Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner, Germany
e-mail: wolfgang.haupt@leibniz-irs.de
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79739-3_8
83
84 W. HAUPT ET AL.
community support for action. In addition, they only represent a small
minority of the global population and an even smaller share of the world’s
cities. There are far more ‘ordinary’ cities—small and mid-sized munici-
palities, and places in the Global South as well as the Global North—than
forerunners. To raise awareness of innovative practices that such places
might wish to adopt, we need more research into how lower-profile cities
are seeking to tackle climate change. This is because all local governments
need to address climate change, and therefore, approaches have to be
developed and shared that are applicable for a wide range of municipalities
rather than just a handful of leaders.
Drawing on environmental and climate governance literature, this
chapter explores and discusses the pathways such ‘ordinary’ cities might
follow to become climate ‘pioneers’. The chapter is sub-divided into four
sections. Following this introduction, we introduce the idea of ‘ordinary’
cities and then explore how such cities might become climate pioneers,
with specific reference to two cases from Germany. Finally, we summarise
our findings and make some recommendations.
‘Ordinary’Cities in a World of Global Cities
In the context of local climate action, we understand ‘ordinary’ cities as
mostly mid-sized or smaller cities that are not high-profile progressive
actors in climate governance. Wurzel et al. (2019) define climate pioneers
as being less externally ambitious than climate leaders, and therefore, we
might expect this term to be more applicable to ordinary cities than their
global counterparts. Although lower-profile places may have pioneered
innovative climate policies, they are generally not famous for having done
so—perhaps because they have not developed particular city branding
strategies or sought to position themselves as climate leaders (Gustavsson
& Elander, 2012).
‘Ordinary’ cities can be best defined by identifying what they may
lack: they benefit from neither a particular power of attraction, nor their
P. Eckersley
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
K. Kern
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
8 HOW CAN ‘ORDINARY’ CITIES … 85
extraordinary size or importance (Robinson 2020; Amin & Graham,
1997;Gerhard,2017). Robinson (2002, p. 535) would refer to them
as cities ‘off the map’—at least in the eyes of most Western observers.
She argues that scholars should seek to study wealthy and innovative
cities alongside poorer cities in the Global South, to identify and exploit
the opportunities to learn from a wide array of diverse urban contexts
(Robinson, 2006). Given that the vast majority of cities have a much
lower profile and are smaller in size than the handful of ‘world cities’
around the globe, we can see how the experiences of such ‘ordinary’
places are probably much more relevant for a wider range of urban
areas. Therefore, if studies and practitioners focus predominantly on high-
profile (often Anglophone) cities in the Global North, they are probably
neglecting the innovations adopted elsewhere that may be much easier
to apply in other contexts. As mentioned beforehand, all cities need to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate
change. We simply can no longer afford to ignore many of the (often
very creative) approaches developed by ‘ordinary’ cities, regardless of their
location.
From ‘Ordinary’Cities to Climate Pioneers
According to Wurzel et al. (2019), potentially every city can become
a pioneer; however, some cities are likely to find it easier than others.
Indeed, previous research suggests that climate pioneers are typically
characterised by high capacities for action (Haupt, 2020; Haupt et al.,
2020; Homsy, 2018;Kern,2019; Otto et al., 2021; Sharp et al., 2011)
and a set of favourable socio-demographic, socio-economic and political
conditions. These are: (i) a growing, young and above-average educated
and skilled population (Bedsworth & Hanak, 2013;Kern,2020; Zahran
et al., 2008), (ii) favourable economic conditions such as high salaries
(Bedsworth & Hanak, 2013;Kern,2020;Zahranetal.,2008), (iii)
support for climate action by city mayors (Bedsworth & Hanak, 2013;
Haupt, 2020; Hoppe et al., 2016), (iv) political influence of green or
alternative parties (Homsy, 2018;Mannetal.,2014), (v) a strong civil
society (Homsy, 2018; Hoppe et al., 2016;Kern,2019), particularly envi-
ronmental groups (Sharp et al., 2011;Zahranetal.,2008), and (vi) a
supportive local research environment (Eckersley, 2018;Kern,2020).
Although ‘ordinary’ cities often lack many of these characteristics, the
presence of powerful and committed actors within the municipality can
86 W. HAUPT ET AL.
help them to introduce pioneering initiatives (Pitt & Congreve, 2017).
These individuals can be (a group of) policy entrepreneurs (Kingdon,
1984) such as specialised staff within the city government, or impor-
tant key figures (Gailing & Ibert, 2016) such as city mayors. Climate
action does not necessarily need to be initiated by the mayor or a leading
politician, but local policy entrepreneurs who wish to introduce ambi-
tious policies will need their political support (Young, 2010). To promote
policy innovations, policy entrepreneurs also need to dedicate a significant
amount of their own resources (e.g. time, capabilities and reputation) and
identify the ‘right moment’ (a ‘policy window’) to place their topic on the
agenda (Mintrom, 2019).
Chances and Challenges for ‘Ordinary’Cities’
This section explores how two ‘ordinary’ cities in Germany: Göttingen
(120.000 inhabitants) and Remscheid (110.000 inhabitants) became
climate pioneers. Our discussion of Göttingen draws heavily on Fenton
and Paschek’s (2018) study, which was based on five expert interviews
and an analysis of key strategic documents. We undertook 11 fieldwork
interviews in Remscheid ourselves, and also conducted extensive analysis
of relevant documentation (see Haupt & Kern, 2020 for a more detailed
examination of this case).
Neither city has the characteristics that we would normally associate
with climate leaders. Two extensive studies that investigated a broad
set of socio-economic, socio-demographic and socio-cultural indicators
in all German cities and counties (Landkreise) found that Remscheid
ranks 360th out of 401 in terms of overall quality of life1and 323rd in
prospected future opportunities,2whereas Göttingen was placed 158th in
both studies. Göttingen does exhibit some features of a typical pioneer:
it is a university city with a young and well-educated population. Never-
theless, an examination of the city’s climate action revealed a high degree
of capacity deficits and a severe lack of municipal resources (Fenton &
Paschek, 2018). For its part, the shrinking industrial city of Remscheid,
1ZDF-Die große Deutschland-Studie 2019: the study analysing the overall quality of life
(https://deutschland-studie.zdf.de/district/09162/default).
2Prognos Zukunftsatlas 2019: the study analysing prospected future opportunities
Prognos Zukunftsatlas (https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/zukunftsatlas-
2019/).
8 HOW CAN ‘ORDINARY’ CITIES … 87
with its very high municipal debt and the resulting capacity constraints, is
a textbook example of a likely laggard (Haupt & Kern, 2020). Despite
these disadvantages, both places took action earlier than most other
German cities of comparable size and completed a wide array of climate
activities (see Otto et al., 2021). Table 8.1 summarises several key
milestones Göttingen’s and Remscheid’s climate action activities.
To cope with their rather unfavourable environments for pioneering
climate policies, both cities needed to look for alternative creative
approaches. Most importantly, Göttingen and Remscheid collaborated
with local key actors (such as universities) to bid successfully for third-
party funding and participate in temporary projects (Fenton & Paschek,
2018; Haupt & Kern, 2020). This has given Remscheid access to crucial
knowledge for developing its climate policy (e.g. in the creation of
local climate analysis maps and maps for simulating flow pathways and
depressions in the case of heavy rainfall). Indeed, all of the city’s climate-
related strategies (mitigation, adaptation, mobility) were developed as
Table 8.1 Milestones of local climate action (external funding bodies in
brackets where applicable)
Göttingen Remscheid
• 1990: energy strategy
• 1991: entry into the Climate Alliance
• 1997: Local Agenda 21 resolution
• 2010: climate mitigation strategy
(national funding)
• 2014: climate strategy aiming at climate
neutrality by 2050 (national funding)
• 2017: climate manager appointed
(national funding)
• 2017: mobility strategy (national
funding)
• 2018: bicycle traffic development
strategy
• 1995: entry into the Climate Alliance
• 1998: ratification of the Alborg
Charta, Local Agenda 21 resolution
• 1999: climate mitigation strategy
(federal state funding)
• 2003, 2007, and 2018: European
Energy Award certification (federal
state funding)
• Climate manager appointed in the
department of building management
(national funding)
• 2013: climate adaptation strategy
(national funding)
• 2014: integrated climate mitigation
strategy (national funding)
• 2017: climate manager appointed
(national funding)
• 2018: mobility strategy (national
funding)
Source Own table
88 W. HAUPT ET AL.
part of funding programmes (Haupt & Kern, 2020). Similarly, Göttin-
gen’s mitigation strategies and climate traffic plan would not have come
about without external funding (Fenton & Paschek, 2018). Moreover,
the city succeeded in a competitive tender process to participate in the
‘Master plan 100% Climate Protection’ funding programme that finan-
cially supports the development of mitigation plans aiming at climate
neutrality by the year 2050.
Nevertheless, dependency on third-party funds can lead to uncer-
tainties in mid-term and long-term planning, because externally-funded
initiatives are often difficult to sustain after projects are completed.
Conscious of this risk, Göttingen has sought to increase public partici-
pation in decision-making and policy formulation, in the hope that this
will create capacity within the city to maintain momentum (Fenton &
Paschek, 2018). In Remscheid, the reliance on external funding had a
detrimental impact on the setting of ambitious long-term climate goals
and developing holistic visions for the future (Haupt & Kern, 2020).
Although Göttingen had already managed to set very ambitious targets, it
still faced the challenge of implementing its strategy and requires ongoing
resources to achieve its climate objectives (Fenton & Paschek, 2018).
Nevertheless, external funding can also lead to the implementation of
concrete measures. As an example, both cities received national grants to
fund the (temporary) employment of a climate manager. Further exam-
ples from Remscheid include various energy-saving projects in public
schools (funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment)
and building up a green facade at a school building (funded by the Federal
Ministry of Education and Research) (Haupt & Kern, 2020).
Outlook and Recommendations
The previous section highlighted how third-party funding for climate-
related projects can help ‘ordinary’ cities to become pioneers. The
German mid-sized cities of Göttingen and Remscheid show that strong
key actors that manage to attract external funding from a variety of
sources can—to a certain extent—compensate for a lack of capacities and
resources. External funding can enable the development of strategies,
engagement of temporary staff and also—to a lesser degree—the imple-
mentation of mitigation or adaptation measures. However, it is as yet
unclear as to whether such an approach provides the only feasible oppor-
tunity for ‘ordinary’ or even ‘disadvantaged’ cities to become climate
8 HOW CAN ‘ORDINARY’ CITIES … 89
pioneers—and questions remain as to whether reliance on third-party
funding is an effective strategy over the longer term, given that projects
often cease when the money runs out. It would hardly be desirable if
bidding for such funding represents the only creative approach that ‘ordi-
nary’ cities can pursue to advance local climate policymaking, but the lack
of studies into this area means that we do not know enough about the
other strategies that they may have adopted to tackle climate change.
As we have discussed, focusing on large leading forerunner cities is
problematic: first, because there is only a limited number of such cities,
and second because their models and solutions are barely replicable for
the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ cities that operate within very different
contexts. Indeed, cities that have pursued approaches that are more likely
to be transferable between ‘ordinary’ cities should receive more atten-
tion. Shining a spotlight on their pioneering activities might not make
these places extraordinary, but it can help to raise awareness of the
types of climate initiatives or place-based approaches that other ‘ordi-
nary’ cities might consider adopting. More studies into these urban areas
should help to highlight and spread the word about innovative practices
in under-researched places. In addition, municipal practitioners could
involve themselves in city networks and exchanges to learn more about
how the pioneering approaches of other places might be applicable to
their own contexts.
There is growing evidence that there are numerous undetected and
unrecognised ‘ordinary’ cities out there that, despite a lack of atten-
tion, have the potential to develop creative and pioneering approaches,
successfully tackle climate change issues within city borders and catch up
to the leaders. Many of them have probably developed diverse creative
approaches already, but have not received due credit for their efforts and
remain largely unacknowledged. Indeed, it is most likely that Göttingen
and Remscheid are not the only German examples of such cities. Ideally,
their creative approaches could serve as inspiration or even models for the
numerous cities that are in a similar situation and thereby help many other
‘ordinary’ or even ‘disadvantaged’ cities to develop successful approaches
themselves.
90 W. HAUPT ET AL.
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holder.
PART III
The Agents of Local Climate Action
CHAPTER 9
Effective Communication on Local
Adaptation: Considerations for Providers
of Climate Change Advice and Support
Kristen Guida and Candice Howarth
Highlights There is a reduction in adaptation action despite science
continuing to produce actionable material. Climate change adaptation
advice and support must be salient, credible and legitimate among other
things.
Keywords Climate adaptation ·Science-practice interface ·Climate
knowledge ·Local action ·Stakeholder engagement
K. Guida
London Climate Change Partnership, London, UK
e-mail: kristen.guida@london.gov.uk
C. Howarth (B)
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment,
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
e-mail: c.howarth@lse.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_9
95
96 K. GUIDA AND C. HOWARTH
Introduction: Ensuring User
Uptake of Climate Science
Climate change is a global issue with impacts felt at the local level, where
many solutions to climate risks are implemented (Howarth et al., 2021).
Working at the climate adaptation, science-practice interface requires
interaction and collaboration across scales, sectors and stakeholders to
identify climate risks, potential solutions and decision points that provide
opportunities to enhance adaptation. However, with scarce resources,
skills and capacity, resilience and adaptation are seldom embedded in
local climate action plans. In part, overcoming barriers that occur at the
science-practice interface requires careful consideration of the credibility,
salience and legitimacy of scientific knowledge.
This chapter explores the challenges that emerge in the science-practice
interface and the extent to which the translation of climate science into
action is enhanced or inhibited when it comes to adaptation action and
building resilience. Through a case study exploring efforts to bridge
the gap between national climate risk assessments and adaptation plan-
ning, we analyse how the balance of salience, credibility and legitimacy
of knowledge is considered at the science-practice interface and discuss
implications of this for local climate adaptation. There are a number of
ways to examine the science-practice gap and to consider the barriers to
uptake and implementation of robust adaptation processes. With calls for
clearer and more useful scientific information (McNie, 2007), this gap is
often presented as a communications problem, with scientists urged to
communicate more effectively, simplify findings, engage proactively with
users and find innovative routes to specific audiences (Bidwell et al., 2013;
Hine et al., 2014; Lemos et al., 2012). However, scientists are often not
trained in the art of science communication and meaningful engagement
that enables mutual understanding of ‘real-world’ needs and the ability of
science to meet them. In addition, potential users of scientific information
often lack sufficient understanding about their adaptation evidence needs
to communicate these effectively to scientists.
We need to understand the barriers and issues for decision-makers
whose evidence requirements may vary widely, and there is a growing
need to understand how to translate science more effectively into practice
to inform decision-making at different scales. In this chapter, we explore
how this translation can happen effectively, and in particular, we explore
whether our established way of thinking about the science-practice gap
9 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION ON LOCAL ADAPTATION … 97
(placing the burden of communication on scientists) is helpful. Or alter-
natively, whether we need to rethink the emphasis and focus to enable a
productive two-way conversation between science and practice.
The Evolving Landscape of Local
Climate Adaptation in the UK
The recognition of the importance of climate change adaptation in the
UK gathered momentum around the turn of the twenty-first century.
From the outset, the need for science-to-practice engagement and
communications to support local adaptation was recognised, and regional
climate change partnerships (CCPs) were established in England to gather
evidence and support risk assessments and adaptation by local authori-
ties, businesses, communities and other actors. In 2008, the UK Climate
Change Act enshrined adaptation in law, and from 2008 to 2010, local
authorities were required to report against a national indicator (NI 188)
on their preparations for a changing climate. To support this effort,
the CCPs were given resource by government to boost coordination
of knowledge sharing and collaboration. They worked closely with the
UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), and later with the Envi-
ronment Agency’s Climate Ready support service, to turn the science
into decision-support tools and resources to tailor advice and support
according to specific audiences, ensuring research met real-world needs
rather than just filling academic knowledge gaps. Examples of this activity
include the dissemination and development of tools like UKCIP’s Busi-
ness Areas Climate Assessment Tool (BACLIAT) and Local Climate
Impacts Profile (LCLIP); a Business Resilience Health Check; regional-
level sector impacts studies and sector-specific adaptation guides; and
national programmes of training and engagement for everyone from
health sector practitioners to highways officers and planners—including
a nationally-accredited qualification on business resilience. CCPs also
worked with local and regional stakeholders to produce regional ‘trans-
lations’ of the first UK Climate Change Risk Assessment in 2012 and
supported the production of local risk assessments informed by both of
the national assessments.
The guiding principle behind all work on local climate adaptation was
that it had to reflect the needs and priorities of the decision-makers and
practitioners who would use it. A tool or resource might be generic,
but it could be presented in a way that would be meaningful for the
98 K. GUIDA AND C. HOWARTH
audience and applicable to the practitioner’s role or task. This meant a
fair amount of stakeholder engagement—including relationship building,
translation and understanding of context and priorities—that researchers
do not often have the time or skill to achieve. However, since the with-
drawal of NI 188 and the disbanding of most CCPs a few years later, there
is a gap in the supply of locally-relevant evidence and the coordination of
stakeholder engagement for awareness and capacity building. In recent
years, the support for engagement and science-to-practice coordination
has disappeared, but the need for it remains as urgent as ever. The UK’s
Climate Change Committee (CCC) has recognised this in their reports
on the UK’s progress on adaptation (CCC, 2021,2019a). In preparation
for the third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), the CCC
commissioned a team led by current and former CCP coordinators to
conduct a study of how to improve the CCRA’s accessibility—and thus
ensure that the National Adaptation Programme effectively addressed the
country’s main climate risks.
Case Study: Assessing Accessibility
of the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is an independent statutory
body established under the 2008 Climate Change Act to advise the UK
and devolved governments on emissions targets and to report to Parlia-
ment on progress towards mitigating and adapting to climate change.
In 2019, the CCC’s Adaptation Committee commissioned a consor-
tium led by Sustainability West Midlands (SWM) to lead a project to
improve the accessibility of the UK third Climate Change Risk Assess-
ment Evidence Report, due to be published in 2021 (CCC, 2019b). The
aim of the project was also to ‘provide the CCC with advice and prod-
ucts to improve the impact of the CCRA by enhancing its accessibility
to its primary customers, which are UK Government departments, the
devolved administrations and government-funded arm’s length bodies’
(p. 3). Whilst local government is not considered a primary customer, the
CCC’s efforts to improve the take-up of scientific evidence provide useful
learning for efforts to promote adaptation at the local level. Evidence has
shown that the first two CCRAs, published in 2012 and 2017, whilst
demonstrating improvements, were difficult for government officials and
stakeholders to access and use effectively (Howarth & Painter, 2016;
Howarth et al., 2018). The third CCRA, as with the previous two, will
9 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION ON LOCAL ADAPTATION … 99
inform the subsequent National Adaptation Programme (NAP) produced
by the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs in 2023.
Accessibility of the CCRA’s products, an understanding of the context in
which these will be received and used, is fundamental to an effective NAP
and to building the UK’s resilience to climate change impacts.
The project delivering this work is ongoing, and hence, we have
focused our (thematic) analysis on the tender document used to commis-
sion it (see CCC, 2019b). We acknowledge therefore that the delivery of
this work may differ from what was set out in the tender; nevertheless,
we see this as a useful way to explore how the accessibility strategy of
the CCRA3 Evidence Report was informed by the guidance provided for
the commissioning of this research and whether this considered aspects of
salience, credibility and legitimacy in the project aims.
We conducted this analysis using Cash et al. (2002)’s framework on
credibility, salience and legitimacy. It suggests that the boundary between
science and policy or science and practice is one of the barriers to effec-
tive uptake of scientific knowledge to inform decision-making. In order to
overcome this, Cash et al. argue that evidence used to inform decision-
making must be credible (e.g. authoritative, believable, trusted), salient
(information relevant to decision-makers’ decisions) and legitimate (infor-
mation produced is unbiased and fair and considers the values and needs
of different actors). The challenge with this, however, is that actors on
either side of the science-practice boundary see and value credibility,
salience and legitimacy differently. Consequently, in order for scientific
knowledge to be taken up and connected to action, efforts to facilitate
this must be simultaneously credible, salient and legitimate to all stake-
holders involved (Kunseler et al., 2015). However, often credibility is the
predominant focus and salience and legitimacy are given different, lesser
weights and efforts to address one can enhance or dampen the efficacy
and focus of the other attributes. For example, efforts to give more promi-
nence to legitimacy of information can affect (negatively or positively)
the extent to which it is salient to the audience in question. This frame-
work has been used to explore similar processes assessing the usability
and accessibility of climate change evidence (Howarth & Painter, 2016)
and provides a useful and user-friendly way of analysing the CCC’s tender
document for its CCRA3 accessibility project.
Results of our analysis, using Cash et al.’s (2002)frameworkon
salience, credibility and legitimacy criteria, are presented in Table 9.1.
Salience of CCRA3 is addressed throughout the tender document with a
100 K. GUIDA AND C. HOWARTH
Table 9.1 Considerations for Cash et al.’s (2002) salience, credibility and
legitimacy criteria in the CCC’s tender documentation (CCC, 2019b)
Example reference in tender document
Salience
For example, relevant to decision-makers’
decisions
‘Both Government and the CCC are
therefore interested in understanding how
CCRA2 was used by its primary customer
group (UK Government departments,
devolved administrations and arm’s
length bodies), what the barriers were to
obtaining the information required for
different stakeholders to develop their
plans, and how the summary materials
should therefore be produced for
CCRA3 to assist in improving its
usability and impact as a resource for
Government’ (Background section, p. 4)
‘The aim of this project is to help the
CCC to present the CCRA3 Evidence
Report in such a way as to best enable
the Government, devolved
administrations and arm’s length bodies
to use the outputs effectively in their
resulting national adaptation
programmes’ (Aims and Objectives, p. 4)
Credibility
For example, authoritative, believable,
trusted
‘It is important for the CCRA to be
carried out in a robust, independent and
transparent way, and for all supporting
evidence, assumptions and rationale to be
provided’ (Background section, p. 3)
‘The CCC has limited budget/staff to
undertake a major communications
campaign in-house, and contractors will
need to be mindful of this when
formulating their recommendations’
(Challenges, p. 10)
‘All applicants will need to identify and
propose arrangements for initial scrutiny
and ongoing monitoring of ethical issues.
The appropriate handling of ethical issues
is part of the tender assessment exercise
and proposals will be evaluated on this as
part of the ‘addressing challenges and
risks’ criterion’ (Ethics, p. 11)
(continued)
9 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION ON LOCAL ADAPTATION … 101
Table 9.1 (continued)
Example reference in tender document
Legitimacy
For example, unbiased, fair and considers
values and needs of different actors
‘Getting to the heart of the accessibility
issue for CCRAs; this will include taking
into account differing perspectives from
different stakeholders and judging what
outcomes would work best to improve
the impact of CCRA3 for its main
customer. Considerable knowledge and
experience of communications best
practice will be required’ (Challenges,
p. 10)
‘Understanding the perspectives of
stakeholders sufficiently to work out what
they need. This may be very simple
materials rather than more innovative
forms of communication. User needs
must come before the desire for
innovation or being ‘on trend’ in this
project’ (Challenges, p. 10, text in bold
emphasised in document)
focus on the use of the report by its primary customer group (i.e. govern-
ment) and the extent to which lessons on how previous CCRAs were
used to inform decision-making could help improve usability and impact
of CCRA3. This is specifically addressed by capturing views of govern-
ment officials and other stakeholders (business is given as an example)
of barriers to uptake and use of CCRAs 1 and 2 Evidence Reports
and supporting materials such as charts, diagrams and descriptions of
the risks and opportunities. There is, however, no explicit mention of
consulting stakeholders (government and others) as to what specifically
they require to enable the effective use of these materials and any insti-
tutional, capacity, resource or knowledge barriers that will affect CCRA3
uptake. Nevertheless, stakeholders were consulted throughout the project
via surveys, interviews and workshop sessions about what barriers and
enablers they saw to the effective use of the CCRA materials. In addi-
tion, the selection of project outputs analyses (e.g. sector fact sheets,
country summaries, new CCRA website) also supports a strong emphasis
on salience.
The credibility of the work needed is emphasised strongly from the
outset with a focus on robustness, independence and transparency. A
102 K. GUIDA AND C. HOWARTH
strong emphasis on learning from wider contexts emerges as does quality
assurance, with open and regular communication between the awarded
project consortium and the CCC. The robustness of the project is further
enhanced by engagement between the consortium and other CCC-
funded CCRA3-relevant activities to ensure consistency, alignment and
ultimately trust in the outcomes and outputs. With a major output of the
work being a communication strategy for CCRA3, the tender highlights
the limitations of the CCC in-house team in terms of capacity, resource
and skills, to deliver such strategy. Whilst this may be seen as calling
into question the ability to deliver the recommendations set out by the
project, we consider this to be a positive acknowledgement of existing
gaps and a constructive way to ensure the delivery of the work takes this
into consideration.
The legitimacy of the work is prominently reflected in the project.
Acknowledging limitations of previous CCRAs, the awarded consortium
is expected to take seriously previous concerns as well as the needs and
views of end-users to improve take-up of the findings of CCRA3. This
speaks strongly to Cash et al.’s legitimacy criteria and prioritises this over
a ‘desire for innovation or being ‘on trend’ in this project’ (p. 10). This
is a requirement both in the outputs produced and in the method of
working with government officials.
Credibility, salience and legitimacy are fairly well considered in the
tender document and help shape and define what is expected. However,
there is little to indicate how the project views the end result of the effort;
that is, what success looks like and how this will address issues discussed
above in regard to capacity of end-users to deliver on the recommenda-
tions made. In particular, a clear formulation of what the issue is, beyond
simply improving communication and instead outlining clearly what issues
exist for different decision-makers across different policy areas, levels and
sectors, requires a sustained monitoring effort.
Concluding Remarks
By exploring the CCC’s efforts to improve accessibility and uptake of the
CCRA3 in the light of the salience, legitimacy and credibility framework,
we seek to encourage more critical consideration and analysis of the way in
which climate change science is taken up in practice to inform adaptation
measures and resilience on the ground, including at the local level. We
note, however, that communication alone is not the sole issue to consider,
9 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION ON LOCAL ADAPTATION … 103
and that the results of this accessibility project will not be known for a
while. We also note that the main audience identified by the CCC for both
this project and the CCRA3 is central government, despite an awareness
that CCRA3 outputs will also be used to inform local adaptation and
resilience.
The barriers to uptake considered as part of the CCRA3 accessibility
project referred mainly to ongoing developments in the production of the
CCRA3 visual and written outputs and government timelines, with little
mention of the pressures and processes that may affect use, usability and
accessibility of the CCRA3 products by end-users (and end-users beyond
the primary customer group, particularly at the local level). Even where
the best science and communication are in place, other barriers may exist.
Organisations often lack critical capacity in terms of personnel within
organisations to use the science (e.g. often there is nobody with climate
change adaptation in their job description), and they may lack knowledge
and skills to use the science (i.e. adaptation requires a different set of skills
from many other environment-/climate-related roles like carbon mitiga-
tion or waste/circular economy) and of how climate change relates to a
particular organisation’s objectives and priorities; there is the perception
of adaptation as an environmental issue with lesser importance; a lack of
support from leadership can manifest in a lack of urgency and resources
assigned to adaptation, and regulatory frameworks can also inhibit consid-
eration of climate change or longer-term risks. Similarly, other policies
and priorities often compete or conflict with climate change adaptation.
Finally, the emphasis on a ‘science first’ approach to adaptation rather
than a ‘context-based’ approach can lead to unnecessary and distracting
confusion over the uncertainties of climate science.
The accessibility project meets the credibility, legitimacy and salience
tests as set out by Cash et al., and as such could stand as a good example
of how to consider or commission communication in the science-practice
space. However, the results of this work remain to be seen and evaluated.
The authors suggest that any future evaluation considers the role of other,
non-communication-related barriers to uptake, namely capacity and the
lack of an enabling environment.
Often the provision of science and evidence to inform practice is
explored as are the gaps, challenges and barriers to ‘using’ scientific
evidence. What is needed is a better and deeper understanding of where
the relationship between science and practice breaks down and how this
manifests at a local level where many climate adaptation solutions are
104 K. GUIDA AND C. HOWARTH
implemented. How science is communicated is only one of many chal-
lenges; there is also a need to recognise the range of other factors that act
as barriers to take up.
References
Bidwell, D., Dietz, T., & Scavia, D. (2013). Fostering knowledge networks for
climate adaptation. Nature Climate Change, 3, 610–611.
Cash, D. W., Clark, W., Alcock, F., Dickson, N. M., Eckley, N., & Jaeger, J.
(2002). Salience, credibility, legitimacy and boundaries: Linking research, assess-
ment and decision-making (KSG Working Paper Series RWP02-046). Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA.
Committee on Climate Change. (2019a). Progress in preparing for climate
change—2019 Progress Report to Parliament. CCC.
Committee on Climate Change. (2019b). Invitation to tender for research:
Improving accessibility of the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment Evidence
Report (Tender Ref. KB-0819).
CCC. (2021). Progress in adapting to climate change—2021 Report to
Parliament.https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/2021-progress-report-
to-parliament/.
Hine, D. W., Reser, J. P., Morrison, M., Phillips, W. J., Nunn, P., & Cooksey, R.
(2014). Audience segmentation and climate change communication: Concep-
tual and methodological consideration (WIRES Climate Change).
Howarth, C., Barry, J., Fankhauser, S., Gouldson, A., Lock, K., Owen, A., &
Robins, N. (2021). Trends in local climate action in the UK. A report by the
Place-Based Climate Action Network (PCAN), UK.
Howarth, C., Morse-Jones, S., Brooks, K., & Kythreotis, A. (2018). Co-
producing UK climate change adaptation policy: An analysis of the 2012
and 2017 UK Climate Change Risk Assessments. Environmental Science and
Policy, 89, 412–420.
Howarth, C., & Painter, J. (2016). The IPCC and local decision-making on
climate change: A robust science-policy interface? Palgrave Communications,
2, 16058.
Kunseler, E.-M., Tuinstra, W., Vasileiadou, E., & Petersen, A. C. (2015). The
reflective futures practitioner: Balancing salience, credibility and legitimacy in
generating foresight knowledge with stakeholders. Futures, 66, 1–12. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.10.006
Lemos, M. C., Kirchhoff, C. J., & Ramprasad, V. (2012). Narrowing the climate
information usability gap. Nature Climate Change, 2, 789–794.
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McNie, E. C. (2007). Reconciling the supply of scientific information with user
demands: An analysis of the problem and review of the literature. Environ-
mental Science & Policy, 10(1), 17–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.
2006.10.004
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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holder.
CHAPTER 10
Diversifying the Private Sector in Local
Climate Commissions
Robert Connell and Matthew Lane
Highlights We ask who exactly it is that represents the ‘place’-based
interests of the private sector? Nuanced understanding of private sector
required; beyond simply the biggest emitters and richest organisations.
Keywords Climate commissions ·Place-based ·Private sector ·Climate
action
Introduction
In this chapter, we reflect on desk-based research carried out to support
the Place-based Climate Action Network’s (PCAN) project’s ambitions to
establish impactful climate commissions in cities across the UK (PCAN,
R. Connell (B)
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
M. Lane
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
e-mail: matthew.lane@ed.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_10
107
108 R. CONNELL AND M. LANE
2020). These aim to act as an independent body of place-based stake-
holders (situated actors invested in the future of a location) working to
accelerate action on climate change in their ‘place’. Using the current
compositions of the three PCAN Climate Commissions (Belfast, Edin-
burgh and Leeds) as our starting point, in this chapter, we engage with
the question of how existing understandings of the private sector might
be broadened to more holistically capture the diverse perspectives and
opportunities that the sector might offer to the work of city climate
commissions.
Researchers on the subject of climate change and business often tout
the private sector as the vehicle through which to realise ambitious climate
targets via economic incentives and regulation (Averchenkova et al., 2020;
Stern, 2007). It is a robust argument to state that the private sector is
a powerhouse of economic, logistical and innovative momentum which
(in theory) has the capacity to act on climate change, if appropriately
harnessed (Hawken, 2017). As such, and acknowledging the private
sector’s omnipresence in industrialised society, city-based climate commis-
sions have identified the private sector as a potential source of influential
individuals and organisations (PCAN, 2020). The question of who gets a
seat at the table, however, will be place-specific and therefore arguably in
need of a more nuanced approach than simply championing the involve-
ment of the ‘private sector’. Indeed, we ask here, who exactly is it that
represents the ‘place’-based interests of the private sector?
Reflecting on our critical and conceptual engagement with this ques-
tion, we suggest here that climate commissions approach the private
sector with a degree of granularity, rather than perceiving it as a collec-
tion of independent businesses clustered into one spatial monolith. To
encourage more effective fostering of local climate action on the part
of the business environment, we hope to describe some of the benefits
that climate commissions could gain by understanding and integrating a
multiplicity of a city’s stakeholders from the wider private sector ‘ecosys-
tem’. Including a more eclectic range of local actors in place-based climate
commissions would offer new perspectives, knowledge and influence to
draw from. In this chapter, we identify and discuss some specific exam-
ples of place-based stakeholders from the private sector, that have thus far
been overlooked by PCAN commissioner recruitment and reflect on the
insight they might provide in enhancing local climate action.
10 DIVERSIFYING THE PRIVATE SECTOR … 109
In the following section, we present the output of a research project
which sought to distil, from existing academic literature, a comprehen-
sive framework for capturing the diverse and varying set of competitive
and economic benefits, or motivators, for private sector organisations to
take action against climate change. Whilst this framework yields numerous
theoretical insights and further avenues of research, its use in this chapter
is practical—as a device to identify new actors with something to offer to
the ambitions of climate commissions. In the subsequent sections of the
chapter, we connect the identified private sector motivators for climate
action from the framework to the sorts of stakeholders of a locality that
are able to speak to these motivations at the place-based scale. In doing so,
the framework enables the identification of (and offers recommendations
on) actors who might be considered when deciding on the composi-
tion of place-based climate commissions. This is based on their capacity
to mobilise different agencies with local private sector ecosystems. In
conclusion, we offer some further (more speculative) thoughts on the
relationship between climate action, place and the private sector.
Mapping Business Motivations for Climate Action
The research project on which this chapter is based took the form of a
comprehensive desk-based, ‘Integrated literature review’ (Torraco, 2005)
carried out by the chapter’s lead author between April and August 2020.1
The motivation to create a synthesised conceptual framework emerged
out of a necessity to tie together a largely disparate body of private sector
and climate action literature in order to move debates beyond the ‘usual
suspects’ of the field (Evans, et al., 2017; Hoffman, 2016; Schaltegger,
et al., 2012). Figure 10.1 captures the output of this process as a new
framework for approaching the topic of private sector motivations for
taking action against climate change.
Each individual motivator presented in Fig. 10.1 thematically captures
a cluster of economic and strategic benefits for private sector action on
climate change from within the academic literature. Having grouped these
into 5 conceptual clusters (or ‘lenses’), and beginning with explicitly
financial motivations, in what follows we connect the identified clusters to
potential actors who (a) have the potential to offer much needed insight
1This study formed part of dissertation research on the MSc Carbon Management at
the University of Edinburgh.
110 R. CONNELL AND M. LANE
*
*SBM – Sustainable Business Model
Fig. 10.1 A framework of motivators for private sector action on climate change (*SBM—Sustainable Business Model)
10 DIVERSIFYING THE PRIVATE SECTOR … 111
into the nature of this motivator in a particular city or place, and (b) were
overlooked during initial recruitment to, or have not yet been adopted
throughout, PCAN Climate Commissions.
Financial Lens: Chamber of Commerce
Despite a noteworthy presence of numerous individual business member-
ships in PCAN Climate Commissions, there is yet to be a representative
whose remit encompasses the totality of the local business ecosystem.
Whilst such a perspective might not exist with regard to the question of
climate change, it is possible to identify organisations and groups who do
have an explicit relationship with the ‘place-based’ dimension of business
activity. Chambers of Commerce, for example, offer such a perspective,
acting as an advocate for the interests of large quantities of businesses in
very particular places (Chamber of Commerce, 2020). Rather than merely
being the local manifestation of otherwise national or even global corpo-
rations, chambers of commerce are tethered intimately to the locations
to which they pertain, offering an established channel of communica-
tion through which these businesses can potentially be mobilised into
coordinated climate action (Verbovskii & Kosov, 2016).
Regarding mobilisation, chambers of commerce have an established
rapport, confidence and familiarity among their network of businesses,
which would perhaps generate representational equity of businesses in
discussions and decision-making, offering greater buy-in for the commis-
sion objectives. Furthermore, they potentially tap into a wide set of SME
organisations who may have larger (cumulative) carbon footprints than
individual large corporations and are more likely to have local supply chain
networks which contribute to the city’s footprint.
External Lens: Residents’Representatives
Within the framework presented in Fig. 10.1, external motivators for busi-
nesses to engage in climate action consist of the economic and strategic
benefits of a positive reputation derived from their climate engagement
(Hoffman, 2016). In a place-based context, we therefore propose that
one of the most important local external actors to businesses is the
consumers in that city. As such, we suggest there is merit to the idea
of involving local citizens in climate commissions, perhaps even ones for
whom addressing climate change is not seen as a governance priority. As
112 R. CONNELL AND M. LANE
with the chamber of commerce example above, engagement with local
businesses and their customers seems like an impactful strategy in the
pursuit of buy-in for commission aims and objectives. Moreover, the
merits of offering greater representation representing to a place’s residents
extend beyond the context of the private sector, in which this chapter is
based, and can offer social and emotional perspectives which complement
economic purposes for protecting cities from climate consequences.
Beyond achieving greater inclusiveness, the addition of residents’
representation to climate commission compositions would ensure the
entire spectrum of city actors, from governance bodies at the top to
individual residents at the bottom, is accommodated in a unified city
transition. Such an approach is also merited on the basis of some of
the recognised failings of previous ‘place-based’ sustainability initiatives.
For instance, the flagship policy of the 2010 UK Conservative Party,
termed ‘Big Society’, fostered an inorganic sense of community due to
the absence of local public input (Walker & Corbett, 2013). Similarly, the
grassroot Transition Towns network, whilst generating social acceptance
among residents, failed to make substantial transformations of localities
as they failed to engage governing bodies to facilitate systematic change
(Feola & Nunes, 2014). Indeed, the Leeds PCAN Climate Commis-
sion has noted that their own Citizen’s Jury has offered constructive
contributions through publicly announced recommendations, which have
also furthered engagement, awareness and facilitated personal behaviour
change among involved citizens (Leeds Climate Commission, 2019).
Moreover, the Croydon Climate Crisis Commission also invites members
of its local Citizen’s Jury to sit on the commission as commissioners,
offering the core PCAN commissions another opportunity to learn how
to engage their own Citizen’s Juries.
Internal Lens: Local Trade Union Chapters
In contrast to external motivators, internal motivators are economic and
strategic benefits of climate action that are realised within the business,
namely employee productivity. Contemporary literature has identified that
employees working for businesses that are proactive in their climate action
derive a sense of heightened purpose, which has shown to positively corre-
late with greater productivity (Bocken & Geradts, 2020). As employees
are responsible for the functional day-to-day operation of businesses, we
identify the local workforce as a vital segment of the private sector, who
10 DIVERSIFYING THE PRIVATE SECTOR … 113
warrant consideration for involvement in climate commissions. Whilst in
the previous section we discussed the role of residents as consumers who
offer a substantial collective agency in terms of pro (and anti-) environ-
mental behaviour within the private sector, here we reflect on the extent
to which more formal representation for employment-related issues offers
another route to place-based buy-in for commissions.
By including local trade union chapters in their make-up, climate
commissions would likely benefit from the established, vast network of
employees across many industries within their local region that trades
unions offer. Their cooperation could present the opportunity for estab-
lished trades union networks to be used as a channel of communication to
many residents of a city. Moreover, the pragmatic nature of trades unions,
coupled with their knowledge of mobilising action, would possibly lend
useful insight into climate commissions who aspire to muster a mean-
ingful low-carbon transition. Furthermore, for an equitable transition to
a low-carbon society to be achieved, the welfare of employees who work
in high-emissions industries must be considered (Newell & Mulvaney,
2013). If a city hopes to achieve net-zero climate targets, businesses that
are no longer viable in a green future must be reformed or made obso-
lete (Figueres & Rivett-Carnac, 2020). As such, trades unions could play
a vital role in ensuring the fair transition of employees to new industries
that are aligned with climate targets.
Legal Lens: Devolved Powers
In the context of place-based climate action, the main legal motivator for
climate action that was identified in Fig. 10.1 was regulatory prepared-
ness. The research found that businesses that have taken climate measures
that go beyond expected climate regulation enjoy strategic and economic
benefits to businesses that are continuously reacting to conform to new
regulation (Bocken & Geradts, 2020). As actors must adapt in accor-
dance with local regulation in order to be allowed to engage in business
activities (Hoffman, 2016), the legal lens indicates that decision-making
entities of local business regulation warrant a discernible segment in the
private sector, as they play a significant role in steering it.
In a city context, local city councils are identified as senior governing
bodies who often drive ambitious climate targets, such as the Edinburgh
City Council (another place with a local PCAN Climate Commission)
commitment to make the city climate neutral by 2030 (Edinburgh City
114 R. CONNELL AND M. LANE
Council, 2020). Though it is acknowledged that city council representa-
tives are often already climate commission members (indeed in Edinburgh
the council was a founding partner of its local commission), the emphasis
is predominantly on the council’s own sustainability strategies. In addi-
tion to this, we suggest that commissions might prioritise legal experts
who would offer climate commissions with a stronger grasp of the policy
levers currently at the disposal of local authorities. As regularly advocated
for by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), there is
an urgent need to devolve greater decision-maker power to local govern-
ment on issues which impact sustainability and climate change (Davidson,
2019). There is an opportunity for climate commissions to join (or indeed
bolster) the call for such changes.
Risk Mitigation Lens: Land and Real Estate Owners
Climate change risks in the context of the private sector can be broadly
divided into two categories: physical risks and market risks (Cisar et al.,
2011). Physical risks are the danger of physical damage to a business’
assets due to climate change’s consequences via extreme weather events.
Alternatively, market risks emerge from the shifting business landscape
prompted by climate change, which presents economic and competitive
risks to businesses that do not transition effectively to align with a climate
conscious market.
Regarding place, the physical risks are contextually nuanced—not every
city will be subject to the same changing weather patterns—and the
market risks vary from actor to actor within a place’s business ecosystem
(Figueres & Rivett-Carnac, 2020). In both cases, land and real estate
owners (whose properties do not have the same footloose quality that
capital benefits from) offer a potentially captive audience for serious
conversations on addressing climate change. In addition to the risk of
physical damage from extreme weather, COVID-19 has offered recent
evidence of the way in which commercial spaces, office buildings and
other urban land uses can lose significant value due to environmentally
induced market shifts (Chernick et al., 2020). The risk mitigation lens,
therefore, identifies landowners as an instrumental segment of the private
sector. As there are many landowners within a city, we suggest that
landowners with the largest portfolios are considered for involvement in
climate commissions, as well as those that own land or businesses that
10 DIVERSIFYING THE PRIVATE SECTOR … 115
will require significant reform to align with climate targets, and those at
greatest imminent risks of climate change.
Conclusion
The purpose of this short chapter was to illustrate how a better under-
standing of the diversity actors in the private sector can pave the way for
a more nuanced engagement with place-based stakeholder representation
on climate commissions. By getting beyond an over-simplified narrative
for the ‘private sector’ to play a role in combatting climate change, it is
possible to think through how new and emerging city climate commis-
sions can position themselves in ways that allow the diverse and varying
resources at the disposal of situated private actors to be brought to bear
on the climate challenge. The chapter drew on a comprehensive frame-
work of private sector motivations to act on climate change in order to
recommend stakeholders of a place who might offer important routes to
the mobilisation of private sector resources in the pursuit of commission
aspirations.
The financial lens showed the benefits that chambers of commerce
would yield by offering a connection to businesses already embedded
in ‘place’; the external lens recommended a residents’ representative to
give a voice to consumers in the city; the internal lens recommended the
participation of local chapters of trades unions, who may mobilise and
represent the local workforce and ensure a just transition; the legal lens
recommended incorporating intimate knowledge of the levers of power in
governing the private sector currently at the disposal of local authorities;
and finally, the risk mitigation lens proposed the addition of land and real
estate owners given their vulnerabilities to a changing climate.
Though this book chapter has outlined various actors that we believe
would offer valuable private sector representation on commissions, it does
not aim to suggest what roles these new commissioners might assume.
Rather, we wish to demonstrate that the setting-up of a city-based climate
commission, as an attempt to institutionalise place-based experimental
governance, warrants nuanced consideration of who it is that represents
the private sector in ways that can best mobilise its diverse resources at
the local scale. There is a need for close engagement with the unique
setting of any given city, particularly with regard to the relationship (or
lack of it) between private businesses and the political, institutional and
cultural nature of the places in which they are located. The introduc-
tion of some of the diverse actors presented in this chapter (actors who
might not be the most obvious starting point for taking action on climate
116 R. CONNELL AND M. LANE
change) could allow a more intimate and practical engagement with the
private sector, and ultimately generate meaningful climate action at the
city-scale.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
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the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
CHAPTER 11
Citizens’ Assemblies and Juries on Climate
Change: Lessons from Their Use in Practice
Rebecca Wells
Highlights Citizen assemblies and juries (CAJs) must meet generally
accepted standards and be citizen-led to genuinely and credibly engage
citizens. Agreed implementation and follow-up procedures should be
established to ensure CAJs legitimately inform policymaking. CAJs are
not a panacea to public participation on climate change and much more
needs to be done beyond them.
Keywords Citizen assembly ·Citizen jury ·Climate change ·
Democratic deliberative process ·Citizen engagement
Introduction
Globally, 64% of people believe there is a ‘climate emergency’ (UNDP,
2021). Since Bristol declared a ‘climate emergency’ in November 2018,
over 300 councils and the UK Parliament have followed suit (Declare A
R. Wells (B)
London School of Economics, London, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_11
119
120 R. WELLS
Climate Emergency, 2020). In response to this climate emergency narra-
tive, many national and local governments have turned to deliberative
democratic processes such as citizen assemblies and juries (CAJs) as tools
to gauge public opinion to inform their responses to the climate crisis
(Mellier-Wilson & Toy, 2020). Deliberative processes remain relatively
marginal, but CAJs on climate change specifically have recently emerged
in the UK and abroad (Devaney et al., 2020). CAJs can significantly
contribute to engaging more deeply with the public on the climate crisis
and creating more inclusive, citizen-driven policymaking and are widely
supported in academia and by activist groups such as Extinction Rebel-
lion (XR) (Devaney et al., 2020). However, it is important to critically
analyse how CAJs are driving change in practice. To enable learning and
improve future CAJs, this chapter identifies how they could be improved
by assessing their quality and the impact CAJs have had on policymaking.
Academic and grey literature on the use of CAJs as a method
to increase public engagement in climate policymaking was reviewed,
followed by a comparative analysis of the reports produced by completed
CAJs and the responses of governing bodies in the UK as well at the
national level in the UK, Ireland and France. Areas where their use in
practice differed from each other and deviated from the literature were
identified in order to determine how future processes could be improved
to enhance their ability to increase public engagement on climate change.
Are Climate Assemblies and Juries
Useful in Tackling Climate Change?
Tools of deliberative democracy are methods to engage with the public
to create a structured dialogue between citizens, experts and politi-
cians in order to help politicians understand public views on different
policy approaches, creating more informed political decision-making
and thereby increasing the democratic legitimacy of policies (Howarth
et al., 2020; Willis, 2020). National governments usually make top-down
climate policy decisions with little input from the public and lack a clear
sense of the wider public’s mandate for climate action. Yet, few attempts
have been made to engage the public in the need for, and benefits of, tran-
sitioning to a net-zero carbon society (Willis, 2019). Broader and more
direct public participation in climate policymaking has been widely advo-
cated as a way to increase the legitimacy and quality of policy decisions,
and a failure to do so risks public backlash, such as the ‘gilets jaunes’
11 CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLIES AND JURIES … 121
protests which emerged in France (Dietz & Stern, 2008; Kythreotis et al.,
2019).
CAJs are deliberative tools to engage with citizens and supplement
representative democracy by bringing informed citizens’ perspectives into
the decision-making process (Smith & Wales, 2000). The processes are
similar but citizen assemblies usually include a representative sample of
50–160 and citizen juries include 12–30 people in the target population,
a group small enough to be genuinely deliberative but large enough to
be representative (Bryant, 2019; Roberts & Escobar, 2015; Goodin &
Dryzek, 2006). An independent oversight panel consisting of key stake-
holders oversees the process (Wakeford et al., 2015). Participants receive
and cross-examine expert information on a particular issue and delib-
erate with each other, discussing different perspectives and trade-offs to
propose a series of informed and considered recommendations to deal
with that issue (Goodin & Dryzek, 2006; Roberts & Escobar, 2015;
Smith & Wales, 2000).
CAJs can potentially provide better insight into public opinions on
climate change that have been reached in a fair and informed way,
allowing citizens to test and discuss a range of approaches to climate
action whilst facilitating public support for tough policy decisions by
including the concerns and ideas of citizens in policymaking (Willis, 2018;
Devaney et al., 2020;Bryant,2019). However, their use in practice
must be analysed to determine the extent to which they achieve and
demonstrate these deliberative benefits.
Impact on Policymaking
CAJs on climate change tend to generate very ambitious recommen-
dations (Willis, 2020). For example, Wilson and Mellier (2020) claim
that both the UK and French Climate Assemblies generated far more
ambitious policies than politicians have ever proposed. Bryant and Stone
(2020) argue that CAJs’ biggest impact is to create a strong political plat-
form for action by providing elected representatives with a public mandate
on climate change. Often CAJs are followed by increased climate action,
such as in Oxford where the council announced over £1 million addi-
tional funding and £18 million of capital investment to address climate
change along with a range of commitments in response to their Citizens
Assembly (Oxford City Council, 2019).
122 R. WELLS
However, the recommendations produced in CAJs often have an advi-
sory role and compete with advice from other groups, making their
impact on policymaking difficult to identify (Bryant & Hall, 2017;
Flinders et al., 2015). In most cases, commissioning bodies respond to
the recommendations in reference to current policies and claim they
will inform an upcoming climate plan. For example, the recommen-
dations produced by the Brent Climate Change Citizens’ Assembly
(November–December 2019) seem to have had a strong influence over
the 2021–2030 Brent Climate Emergency Strategy, which refers to the
recommendations throughout (Brent Council, 2020). However, this
link is not always obvious. As another example, after the UK Climate
Assembly (January–May 2020), the convening parliamentary committees,
the government and the Climate Change Committee committed to take
the recommendations on board, although it is not clear how (Bouyé,
2020). Dicker (2020) considers the limitations of the process and argues
that the UK Climate Assembly could have been improved by having a
direct link to legislative, policy and funding decisions as it had no mandate
from, or direct link, to government.
The French Climate Assembly (October 2019–June 2020) could
have had a large impact as President Macron gave it the power to
generate policies that could be enacted either through a national refer-
endum, parliamentary vote or directly through executive orders (Wilson
& Mellier, 2020;O’Grady,2021). However, almost a year after the
Assembly, its members rated the French government’s proposed climate
and resilience law 3.3 out of 10 for reflecting their recommenda-
tions, which suggest that its impact has been far from that which was
promised (Climate Home News, 2021). However, recommendations
arguably should not be directly implemented, as CAJs are not autho-
rised to govern through democratic processes such as elections. CAJs’
lack of democratic validity suggests that they should act as an advi-
sory body complemented by further expertise and evidence-based input
(Devaney et al., 2020;O’Grady,2021). For example, after the Irish Citi-
zens’ Assembly, an all-party parliamentary committee was established to
respond to the recommendations on climate change. This committee
published a report largely endorsing and further developing the Assem-
bly’s recommendations, which had a significant role in advising and
shaping the development of the Irish government’s 2019 Climate Action
Plan to Tackle the Climate Breakdown (Devaney et al., 2020). Thus,
11 CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLIES AND JURIES … 123
there is a large variation in how CAJs are integrated into policymaking
in practice.
There is a need for agreed follow-up and implementation procedures
for the recommendations produced by CAJs including a guaranteed
response from the commissioning body (Devaney et al., 2020). Ensuring
that recommendations from a CAJ are incorporated into the policymaking
processes in an appropriate and transparent manner is vital to ensure
they are seen as legitimately integrating citizens’ views into policymaking
(Devaney et al., 2020). Nevertheless, CAJs provide a strong mandate and
momentum for climate action which allows policymakers to introduce
more drastic policies, as often seen in practice where stronger climate
policies are announced following them (O’Grady, 2021).
Are These Tokenistic Processes?
There is a risk that CAJs are being used as a tokenistic exercise, enabling
governing bodies to claim that public opinion has been considered, rather
than building a genuine dialogue between them and the public. One key
indication of this is that some processes being labelled CAJs do not meet
the generally accepted standards for them. For example, the Deputy City
Mayor of Leicester (Clarke, 2020) admitted that their Climate Assembly
did not qualify as a citizens’ assembly as its method of recruitment ‘didn’t
match that of a jury or citizens’ assembly’ and the process was only
one day long (Clarke, 2020). Similarly, the Camden Citizens’ Assembly
on the Climate Crisis only totalled 12 hours (Cain & Moore, 2019).
Neither of these cases meet generally accepted standards for CAJs which
should randomly select participants from the population and be at least
20 hours in length to allow proper learning and deliberation to occur
(Cain & Moore, 2019; Mellier-Wilson & Toy, 2020). This suggests that
some engagement processes are wrongly labelled CAJs because they are
currently a trendy engagement method and seen as good politics. For
CAJs to truly realise their potential as deliberative processes and be seen as
legitimate long-term forms of public engagement on climate change, they
must be done rigorously and meet generally accepted standards (Bryant,
2019;O’Grady,2021).
Those processes being run with a more consultative structure where
participants prioritise a pre-prepared list of policy options versus those
which allow participants to come up with their own recommenda-
tions also run the risk of being used as tokenistic exercises (Bryant &
124 R. WELLS
Stone, 2020). For example, the French Climate Assembly was citizen-
led as it was a political chamber where citizens came up with legislative
proposals, which could be directly passed into law (Wilson & Mellier,
2020). In contrast, the recommendations produced by the UK Climate
Assembly were based on predetermined policy options meaning that citi-
zens were not able to shape the agenda, process or come up with their
own measures, instead considering those already drafted by government
(Wilson & Mellier, 2020). A more consultative structure may be little
more than a short-term consultation for interested parties to give the
appearance of public legitimacy to political decisions that have already
been made (Wakeford et al., 2015). Therefore, future processes should
aim to be citizen-led to allow public concerns to be truly considered in
policymaking.
Wider Public Engagement
CAJs have the potential to ignite wider public debates on climate change.
Going back to the example of the French Climate Assembly, it gener-
ated a genuine national debate. 70% of people in France knew of the
Assembly, and of those, 64% considered its work useful to fight against
climate change (Resau Action Climat France, 2020). Thus, the Assembly
generated a powerful mandate for change but also a movement of people
who engaged with the Assembly itself (Wilson & Mellier, 2020). CAJs
run in the UK have largely failed to ignite a wider public debate, often
due to budget limitations and integrated planning but also because CAJs
are rarely seen as tools which can start a wider public dialogue (Bryant
& Stone, 2020). This is a missed opportunity as CAJs should aim to
generate a public debate to increase momentum and hold governing
bodies accountable for the recommendations (Wilson & Mellier, 2020).
However, CAJs are not a panacea for solving issues with public
participation and climate policymaking (Smith & Wales, 2000; Devaney
et al., 2020; Flinders et al., 2015). CAJs only represent one form of
public engagement and deliberation on climate change, and there are a
variety of other communications, education and engagement initiatives
available (Devaney et al., 2020). Additionally, public engagement with
climate change is required beyond the formal process of CAJs so that
people better understand and can help shape low-carbon transformations
(Capstick et al., 2020; Devaney et al., 2020). This is demonstrated by the
fact that the recommendations produced by almost all CAJs request more
11 CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLIES AND JURIES … 125
education and engagement with citizens on climate change. For example,
8 out of the 25 recommendations produced by the Lancaster district
Climate Change People’s Jury revolved around improving communica-
tions, education and council leadership on climate change (Shared Future,
2020). Therefore, whilst CAJs are a positive step towards increasing
public engagement on climate change, much more needs to be done to
engage with citizens on this issue. CAJs should be used alongside other
tools to engage the public and enable them to play a role in climate
change policymaking.
Conclusion
Overall, this chapter highlights how the use of CAJs in practice must be
critically assessed to allow future CAJs to be improved and have maximum
impact on climate action in practice. There is a need for agreed follow-
up and implementation procedures to increase transparency in how CAJs
create more citizen-centred policymaking and prevent their use becoming
tokenistic. The structure of CAJs varies in practice, impacting the extent
to which they truly incorporate citizens’ views into the construction of
climate policies. Thus, CAJs must be designed carefully to enable their
potential benefits to be realised. Furthermore, processes which claim to
be CAJs on climate change should meet generally accepted standards to
ensure that they represent rigorous deliberative processes and are not
tokenistic exercises being used to give the illusion that public opinion
has been taken into account in policymaking.
The limitations of CAJs must also be considered when they are being
designed and used. For example, CAJs only include a small proportion of
the target population, so their representativeness is not a given and their
recruitment processes must be robust if their outcomes are to be truly
representative.
Nevertheless, CAJs provide an opportunity to gather views on climate
change of an informed and representative group of the target popula-
tion. CAJs can also engage the wider public in climate change debates,
an opportunity that future CAJs should seize in order to maximise their
impact. However, CAJs only represent one form of citizen engagement
and are not a panacea to tackling issues around public engagement on
climate change. Thus, whilst their expanding use can increase public
engagement on climate change, they cannot be the only mechanism to
do so.
126 R. WELLS
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CHAPTER 12
Universities as Living Labs for Climate Praxis
Zoe P. Robinson, Philip Catney, Philippa Calver,
and Adam Peacock
Highlights University living lab success relies on careful navigation
of complex relationships between different actors. Maximising change
through living labs requires educational objectives and learning processes
embedded in governance.
Keywords Climate change ·Living labs ·Universities ·Campuses ·
Climate praxis
Z. P. Robinson (B)·A. Peacock
Institute for Sustainable Futures/School of Geography, Geology and the
Environment, Keele University, Keele, UK
e-mail: z.p.robinson@keele.ac.uk
P. Ca t n e y
School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Keele, UK
P. Calver
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester,
Manchester, UK
© The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3_12
129
130 Z. P. ROBINSON ET AL.
Introduction
Climate imperatives have led to an increased interest in the use of ‘living
labs’ as places of experimentation and innovation for climate-related
solutions. The term living lab in the context of this paper is used to
describe the combination of a place (e.g. a university or city) and a
research and built environment management approach where innova-
tions are trialled in the ‘real world’ for the purpose of both making
sustainable improvements and generating learning about the effective-
ness of the solution and implementation process. Living Labs can occur
at different scales, but are typically viewed as geographically bounded
and involving intentional interventions and feedback loops to facilitate
adaptive learning, and experimental forms of collaborative governance
between diverse stakeholders (Evans & Karvonen, 2014; Evans et al.,
2015). Alongside the development of urban living labs, developed in part-
nership between government and public and private property owners (see
Evans & Karvonen, 2014), university campuses provide additional venues
for the development of living labs as places of climate praxis. Both settings
share some characteristics; however, each has their own opportunities and
challenges.
Universities can impact climate praxis in many ways, one example is
that, as sizable organisations, they have significant energy demands. An
increasing imperative to reduce carbon emissions from their estates is
reflected in the numerous university declarations of a climate emergency
and ambitious net-zero targets. Universities have the potential to catalyse
wider-scale changes in climate praxis through education, research and
business engagement activities. Additionally, with a growing emphasis on
partnerships with industry and government, universities are increasingly
playing an important part in their wider regions as ‘anchor institutions’,
providing leadership and support on issues such as economic develop-
ment, health and environmental matters (Birch et al., 2013). These factors
demonstrate that university campuses are ‘privileged space[s] of inno-
vation’ (Evans & Karvonen, 2014, p. 415), offering the potential to
trial new governance approaches and technologies for climate change
mitigation in ways that may be difficult to undertake in other public
settings.
It is critical to recognise that whilst all universities can contribute to
climate praxis, not all are equally placed to perform as living labs. Factors
that contribute to universities as propitious places for exploring climate
12 UNIVERSITIES AS LIVING LABS FOR CLIMATE PRAXIS 131
solutions include independent management of their utility networks,
control over a multi-use built environment (including retail, catering,
leisure, conferencing, offices, residential and laboratory facilities) and a
significant and diverse community of staff and students who may live
and work within the university campus ecosystem. Often this campus
ecosystem represents the scale and complexity of a small town, in turn
securing their potential as living labs (Colding & Barthel, 2017).
Even where this combination of useful characteristics is present, signif-
icant challenges remain. For example, the complexity of the university
ecosystem, one of the qualities that make university living labs so attractive
in the first place, needs to be considered explicitly as part of project design
and implementation. To this end, this chapter draws on reflections from
two university-based, campus-scale sustainable energy-transition ‘living
lab’ projects to explore two key areas of challenges and opportunities that
require consideration if we are to maximise the potential of universities as
places of climate praxis.
After outlining the projects and setting for the living lab, our first
reflection explores the experiences of those in the living lab and how
these may be mediated by their relationships with the university and the
complexity of their interlinked private and public spheres. In addition, we
highlight the need for project implementers to be sensitive to the position
and views of the living lab ‘users’. The second reflection explores how to
harness university-based living lab projects to address specific educational
opportunities within a university living lab, and enhance climate change
and energy literacy, helping to prepare society for sustainable transitions.
The Living Lab Projects
The reflections of the two energy-transition projects based at one univer-
sity are drawn from the different positionalities and roles of the authors
in relation to the projects. These include formal academic representa-
tion in project governance, data collection, membership of the staff,
student, and resident community, and roles pertaining to sustainability
governance in the university. The reflections are also influenced by inter-
view data collected from research carried out in relation to both projects,
comprising 27 interviews with a range of project stakeholders across both
projects. The university is not named for anonymity purposes.
Whilst both projects relate to climate praxis through greenhouse gas
reduction in the university’s energy systems, the projects’ foci differed.
132 Z. P. ROBINSON ET AL.
The first project aimed to demonstrate the safe, efficient and non-
disruptive distribution of blended hydrogen in the gas network. The
second project focused on the development of a smart energy network
management system linked to a significant increase in onsite renewable
electricity generation. Both were multi-million-pound projects supported
by public funding. The hydrogen project was led by one of the UK’s
gas distribution network operators, alongside the university and indus-
trial partners. The project utilised the university’s private gas network as
the first trial stage prior to a public site trial. In contrast, the smart energy
network project was led by the university, with a major engineering multi-
national corporation as the key design and delivery partner. This project
aimed to make the campus a research and development facility, creating
an at-scale living lab where smart energy strategies and technologies could
be researched, developed and tested in a real-world environment, whilst
also delivering against ambitious onsite carbon reduction targets.
The university hosting these projects is a semi-rural campus university
with a student population of 10,000 and a large campus estate of 600
acres. As well as accommodating over 3,000 students on campus (largely
in on-campus halls of residence), there are over 100 properties on campus
for staff (and former staff) residents. These properties range from flats to
detached houses and have a mix of owner-occupied and rental properties
where the university acts as the landlord. A proportion of residences on
campus are second homes for staff who have permanent residences at a
distance from the university, and only spend a portion of a week or the
year living on the campus, whilst other campus residences are permanent
homes for staff and their families. An array of catering, leisure and retail
amenities also exists. These aspects, alongside its private utility networks,
make it a particularly attractive site as a living lab for at-scale climate praxis
innovations.
Understanding the Experience
of Living in a Living Lab
Key to the concept of a living lab is that there are ‘users’ interacting
with its technological and governance systems as part of their normal
routine. In the context of our case studies, the users range from the staff
and student residents and campus users to the estates-based staff with
responsibility for the operation and services of the built environment.
12 UNIVERSITIES AS LIVING LABS FOR CLIMATE PRAXIS 133
Reflecting on interviews with the living lab residents highlights the
diverse views that can exist about being part of such projects. Attitudes
towards and prior experiences with the university itself appear to strongly
influence residents’ perceptions of projects and their willingness to actively
engage. Whilst our interviews demonstrated that some residents may feel
very positive about the projects and pride in their and the university’s
involvement, other residents showed some dissatisfaction.
One issue that was raised was how households are recruited to be part
of the living lab and the limited opportunity to ‘opt out’ with some
residents believing the university was making proprietary decisions over
the residents’ private spaces. In a university living lab where many of
the ‘users’ are academics engaging regularly and explicitly with issues of
research ethics, sensitivities on the issue of consent may be particularly
heightened. This needs careful consideration and management by project
implementers particularly if there are longer-term aspirations to include
the whole campus environment as a living lab. These issues reflect wider
debates about the role of informed consent as an integral element of
justice within the transition to a new energy future (Sovacool & Dworkin,
2015). Whilst these issues are relevant for all living labs, there are impor-
tant nuances in a university setting due to the complex relationships
between project implementers and living lab ‘users’.
In addition, privacy concerns for some influenced project implemen-
tation. Specifically, some campus households were unhappy about the
request for smart meter installation, mirroring privacy concerns in the
general population (see, for example, McKenna et al., 2012). We found
the desire for privacy potentially compounded by increased sensitivi-
ties relating to the complex relationship between resident and univer-
sity employer, and interestingly heightened in times of university-wide
work-related disputes. These reflections underscore the need for project
implementers to be sensitive to the ways in which users’ perception of a
technology is potentially entangled with their social identities and their
contexts in complex and dynamic ways (Callon & Rabeharisoa, 2003),
and how this plays out in a university setting.
Whilst residents’ prior experiences of, and assumptions about, the
university play out in their perceptions of being involved in a university
living lab, project implementers’ assumptions about, and previous expe-
riences of, residents and other users may also influence how residents
and other users are incorporated into and engaged within projects. Our
reflections demonstrate that residents often viewed themselves as active
134 Z. P. ROBINSON ET AL.
stakeholders in the projects with an active interest in and expectations of
being kept informed about the projects. In contrast, project implementers
wanted to reduce disturbing residents by limiting communication when
no direct resident input was seen as necessary, leading to dissatisfaction
for some residents.
Our reflections on interviews with diverse living lab stakeholders and
our own positionalities highlight the need for project implementers to
acknowledge the important role of users within a living lab, recognising
these as key, often very engaged stakeholders, and hence the need to
ensure that their voices are heard. Effectively embedding users at the
centre of living labs requires community engagement expertise and neces-
sitates a model of governance adaptable to the needs of users, which
are not necessarily automatically part of standard university estate project
implementation. Rather than seeing engagement as a single-stage or
outcome in the project delivery, a greater focus on user-centred gover-
nance can contribute to project success by delivering instrumental benefits
(increasing participant engagement and project support), substantive
benefits (where greater communication leads to better-informed decision-
making) and normative benefits (where a ‘just’ process is developed).
Investing time and money into ongoing engagement with user commu-
nities should be prioritised at the highest level in the governance of all
living lab climate praxis projects.
Maximising Learning and Preparing Society
for the Sustainable Energy Transition
Universities are places of learning. Yet learning takes place not just
through the formal curriculum, but through informal learning oppor-
tunities, including activities outside the classroom and from the campus
environment itself. University living labs therefore may offer the oppor-
tunity to capitalise on this learning mission, to enhance climate praxis and
energy-literacy learning among all its stakeholders.
Increasing citizens’ ‘energy literacy’, the understanding of energy and
its role in society has two important functions. First, it allows informed
citizen engagement with energy decision-making, which many authors
believe will subsequently increase individual support for investment in a
low carbon pathway (DeWaters et al., 2013). Second, it enables decision-
making over personal energy practices to be informed by energy realities
(Hogan et al., 2019; Martins et al., 2020). We are living through an
12 UNIVERSITIES AS LIVING LABS FOR CLIMATE PRAXIS 135
energy paradigm shift, characterised by the decarbonisation, decentralisa-
tion, digitisation and democratisation of our energy systems (Becker &
Naumann, 2017). However, little of the current transitions towards this
shift is visible to the wider public. This ‘invisibility’ of parts of the energy
system could in part explain low levels of energy literacy among citizens
(Cotton et al., 2016).
Research on the energy literacy of students has highlighted both the
patchy energy knowledge of students and the potential for sustainability
and by extension energy learning, from the campus environment (Cotton
et al., 2015). A further potential benefit of user engagement around
specific campus-based energy projects is the potential to catalyse wider
engagement with pro-environmental behaviours, due to increased envi-
ronmental consciousness-raising. Therefore, university living lab climate
praxis projects provide the potential to increase the energy literacy of
campus energy users, increase users’ energy-transition readiness as well
as potentially promote wider pro-environmental behaviours.
Our reflections on the communication and engagement of the climate
praxis projects discussed here are that they were largely focused on indi-
viduals affected by the projects in their private spaces, with more limited
engagement with energy users within the university’s public spaces,
such as building managers, building users and students using university
facilities and in halls of residence. By omitting a deeper level of engage-
ment with these wider, diverse ‘public’ energy user audiences, potentially
important opportunities to enhance wider engagement with energy transi-
tions and climate praxis are missed. To ensure such learning opportunities
are not missed, effective wider stakeholder engagement with climate
praxis projects is required across the diverse energy users on a university
campus, and educational goals need to be embedded in project gover-
nance from the start. This seems particularly important for a university
living lab within the context of a university’s core educational mission and
the opportunities to integrate students into living lab activities. However,
considering the potential for further learning of all stakeholders in any
living lab should also be considered explicitly.
A final area of reflection concerning maximising learning is how univer-
sity project teams learn from their own practices and experiences, and how
the characteristic of flexible, adaptive governance required by living labs
is ensured (Evans et al., 2015). Our path to a sustainable future is not
predetermined and requires reflexive learning and governance structured
around multiple stakeholders and co-creation (McCrory et al., 2020), as
136 Z. P. ROBINSON ET AL.
well as different disciplinary perspectives to maximise learning and test
assumptions. Therefore, project teams should adopt the principles of a
‘learning organisation’ with diverse project stakeholders working together
to improve capacities and transform practice (Senge, 2006). Organisa-
tional learning could be achieved by embedding research and evaluation
of the ‘living lab’ process and user experience into project governance.
However, project teams should go further and develop a genuinely
cross-university community of practice (Wenger, 1999), drawing together
different areas of expertise to help overcome the barriers to effective joint-
action and create more legitimacy for the living lab and the broader goals
of sustainability. A community of practice should not be exclusive to those
working within the project teams, but should include more interaction
with the users and their communities in which living labs are situated
to develop a more nuanced understanding of the context for living lab
interventions but also to enable greater social learning.
Conclusion
Universities are important spaces as living labs for exploring sustainable
solutions due to the mixed-use built environment, private infrastructure
and potential to link with the research, education and business engage-
ment missions of the university. However, there is also a need to recognise
the complexities, sensitivities, challenges and differences that may be
particular to university settings as living labs.
To maximise the potential of universities as living labs for climate praxis
requires:
1. Sensitivity to the lived experience of those within the living lab,
with careful consideration in climate praxis projects of the role
of informed consent in participation, the implications of overlap
between the public and private spheres within the university
ecosystem and attention to the complex, multifaceted relationships
that exist between members of the university community.
2. Effective communication with all project stakeholders and the wider
university community, drawing in expertise in community engage-
ment and communication, ensuring sufficient frequency and depth
to respect the role of stakeholders as energy users in the living lab, as
well as enhance wider learning and energy-transition readiness, and
potentially catalyse further pro-environmental behaviour.
12 UNIVERSITIES AS LIVING LABS FOR CLIMATE PRAXIS 137
3. Project design and governance that allow reflexive learning of
climate praxis within the university and encompass the wider educa-
tional and research missions and interdisciplinarity inherent in a
university, and that embed mechanisms for learning from user
experiences and the ‘living lab’ process itself.
University living labs can support carbon reduction on the estate itself
and share learning to be utilised for other university campuses; they can
also provide distinct testbed environments for climate praxis interven-
tions that can be utilised outside of the university environment. However,
care needs to be taken to consider the transferability of learning between
the university context and wider environment. Although many living lab
projects on universities may focus on a core goal of emissions reductions
from the estate, universities stand apart as places of learning and research.
To maximise the real potential of universities as living labs, the design
and governance of climate praxis projects must not just focus on the
estate, but the learning to be gained through their education and research
missions and the potential to disseminate such learning.
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Index
A
ambition, xi,23,53,54,57,107,109
B
baseline, xi,64–66,68
C
campuses, 130–135,137
carbon emissions, xi,52,54,56,57,
65,66,130
cities, ix,xi,45,65,73,75,80,81,
83–89,107,112
citizen assembly, 120,121
citizen engagement, ix,125,134
citizen jury, xii,121
citizen participation, viii,ix,6
climate action, viii–xiii,4–10,16–21,
23,24,52–54,56–58,63,65,
66,69,73–76,78–81,84–87,
96,107–109,111–113,116,
120–123,125
climate adaptation, x,xii,15,18,24,
87,96,97,103
climate breakdown, vii,4,7,8,52,
122
climate change, vii,viii,x–xii,4,
9,10,16–21,23,24,29,30,
32,40–42,44–47,53,55,57,
63,69,76–78,81,84,85,89,
96–99,102,103,108,109,111,
114–116,120–125,130,131
climate commissions, xii,4,5,7,
64–66,70,73–76,81,107–109,
111–115
climate emergency, vii,x,xi,7,19,40,
42,44,46,47,52,53,55–57,
119,120,122,130
climate emergency declarations
(CED), 53–58,75
climate governance, xi,64,65,70,
74,79,81,84
climate knowledge, xii
climate mitigation, ix,5,54,64,87
climate praxis, viii,7,9,10,130–132,
134–137
commons, 8,28–31,33,58
community, vii–x,4–10,16–22,28,
30–34,40–42,44,45,56,58,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022
C. Howarth et al. (eds.), Addressing the Climate Crisis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3-030-79739-3
141
142 INDEX
75,78,84,97,112,131,134,
136
community climate action, ix,4,5,
7–10
community engagement, x,8,40,41,
45,134,136
county, vii,ix,53,58,64–68,70,86
credibility, xii,96,99,102,103
critical consciousness, 42,43,47
D
democratic deliberative process, 120
E
enabling environment, 52,55,103
engagement, viii,xii,5,6,10,16,
21,24,28,40–43,45,46,52,
54–57,65,79,88,96–98,102,
108,111,112,115,116,120,
123–125,130,134–136
ethnography, 75
F
festival, x,42,43
framing, 8,29,77
L
legitimacy, xii,5,55,96,99,100,
102,103,120,124,136
living labs, xii,130–137
local, vii–xiii,5,9,10,16–18,20,
22–24,31–34,40,42,44–46,
52,54–58,64–70,74,75,81,
84–87,89,96–98,102,103,
108,109,111–115
local governance, 28
local government, xi,18,52–55,57,
58,84,98,114,120
M
multi-level climate action, vii,5,7
N
net-zero, x,27,31,53,54,58,75,
76,79,81,113,120,130
Northern Ireland (NI), vii,ix,4,6–8,
10,97,98
O
‘ordinary’ cities, 84–86,88,89
Ostrom, E., x,28,29,31–33,64
P
participatory action research (PAR), 8,
10
partnerships, x,4,5,18,19,22,34,
58,65,97,130
pioneers, 84–86,88,89
place, vii–x,5,7,11,15–24,28,40,
43,65,74,75,83–86,89,103,
108,109,111–115,130,131,
134,137
place-based, viii,x,4,5,10,17–19,
21–23,58,69,73,74,80,81,
89,107–109,111–113,115
power, 7,21,46,52,57,58,74–76,
80,81,84,114,115,122
private sector, ix,xii,33,52,57,77,
79,108,109,112–116
S
salience, xii,96,99–103
science-practice interface, 96
Scotland, x,16–19,28,54
stakeholder engagement, 98,135
U
universities, ix,xii,5,8,40,53,64,
68,75,76,80,86,87,109,
130–137
