The pilot of the Local Climate Engagement (LCE) programme has come to a close after two years of intensive work with 21 local authorities across England. Our intentions with the programme was to support local authorities to deliver high-quality public engagement projects on local climate policy and initiatives. We heard from a lot of local authorities that they wanted to do this but they weren’t sure where to start.
First of all, why is local climate engagement important?
The Climate Change Committee produced this piece of research that shows that a third of UK greenhouse gas emissions are dependent on sectors influenced by local government policies or partnerships. Members of the public also think their local authority is better placed to take action on climate change (40%) than national Government (30%) and the individual (19%). (These stats come from Ipsos Mori polling commissioned by UK100.)
Local authorities have responded by showing bold leadership and setting ambitious Net Zero targets that are years ahead of national legislation. But we know local authorities are facing systemic issues, many out of their control. This is particularly acute as a result of significant budgetary restraints handed down to local authorities by national Government. Despite these constraints, the LCE programme helped local authorities make significant strides in their local climate engagement work and we saw many of them translate their ideas into impactful plans and projects.
How did it work, and what were the learnings from the pilot?
LCE was a pilot programme designed to work out how best to support local authorities to do their local climate engagement. While the programme had its challenges, it was also incredibly rewarding. The programme is gaining wider recognition and we want to share our learnings so that more local authorities — across all four nations of the UK — are able to do high-quality engagement on climate. Here are my top learnings from the programme:
1. One size doesn’t fit all
We worked with county, city, town and parish councils through LCE. The remit, resources and needs of each local authority varied greatly. What became obvious in the LCE project was that we wanted more time up front to work out what the local authority needed in the project. Often local authorities did not know what they required themselves at the start of the programme. By taking this time initially, we could tailor the programme more to the individual local authority’s actual needs. If we repeated a similar programme, perhaps we could have a phased approach with reviews at different points. Maybe we could provide a menu of choices plus an ‘anything else’ option. One suggestion highlighted by our external evaluator was the possibility to co-develop a theory of change with the local authority at the start. This would create shared ownership of LCE and help the local authority to visualise the journey they are about to embark on.
2. A small input can go far
We had two offers as part of the pilot, coaching groups and project groups. The offer for our 16 Coaching Groups received up to one week of support for five officers. And that’s if they took up all of the offer — three days of intensive training, seven hours of mentoring and three peer learning sessions (plus self-guided resources for senior leaders and elected representatives.The offer for our 16 coaching group local authorities was lighter than for our five project group areas who received a large amount of pro bono support for local climate engagement delivery. Yet this relatively small amount of time for coaching groups yielded significant results in some cases. Results like using local engagement to develop a new climate strategy, commissioning an engagement piece on city centre regeneration, or establishing a new partnership with a climate NGO to co-create an engagement piece. The mentoring for some local authorities made a huge difference so that they could consolidate their learning from the training and put their learning into action.
3. From communication to collaboration
A light bulb moment from many people I worked with in the LCE programme was a shift of thinking about what engagement is. If you were to ask local authority officers and elected members what engagement on climate looks like, many of the responses you would receive is that it's about communication — telling members of their communities about the climate crisis and what the local authority or others are doing about it. If done well, by speaking to people’s values and identities, this can help support climate friendly choices. But by going beyond communication to collaboration on climate issues — opening up decision-making to allow members of the public to help shape climate strategies, policies, services or interventions — members of the public are more likely to get on board with what local authorities are doing. I enjoyed being able to explain that there are many ways of doing this taking into consideration different resources, timescales, and costs. Collaboration doesn’t just have to be doing a ‘shiny’ large-scale engagement methods like a Citizens' Assembly, but can be working with community groups, doing activities at existing events, and using the outcomes from previous engagement processes.
4. Buy-in is needed on different levels
The LCE local authorities that were able to push forward new and different ways of doing local climate engagement were often those that had buy-in across different members within the local authority. This was where there was buy-in from senior management, councillors, and officers on the ground doing the work. This combination mitigated against some of the obstacles we heard about in other local authorities — for example decision-making being blocked by senior managers, or more junior officers not being able to commit to the implementation. In some cases I experienced the situation where once the key drivers of LCE left a local authority could cause big issues. Often where the LCE initiator or champion left, there were delays and ripple effects further down the line. To resolve this we’d want to involve a variety of roles in the project initiation and training for future iterations of LCE. Succession planning needs to be built into programmes like this from the start, working with local authorities to consider how they will deal with potential staff changes without undermining the work already done.
5. What incentivises people is so important
At Involve, we often remunerate members of the public for taking part in our activities. This is a way to ensure people from a diversity of backgrounds and realities are able to take part in our processes. For example, if you want someone on a zero hours contract to give up their time to take part in a process, they should be compensated at least to the value of the work they’d give up. There can be other ways to incentivise people, for example if they see a benefit to themselves or for their CV or it gives them a social benefit. People can want to join an activity because it is particularly emotive or they care about the topic but these aren't always those we want to engage — we often don’t want to hear just from those who are not already switched on to a topic. The LCE evaluation concluded that the lack of diversity of participants in some engagement activities may have been a result of the lack of honoraria and we saw this in the much lower takeup for events in terms of diversity. We know that a lot of local authorities cannot easily prioritise spending on honoraria or can’t offer them for political reasons, so it’s important to think of how to reach out to your target groups, especially those least heard in climate decision-making. Inclusion and diversity needs to be an explicit focus. How about a pizza party for young people where they share their perspectives (where the pizza is the incentive)? Or can you provide a creche for a drop-in session for care-givers of young kids? We are now looking into developing an additional half day module to support the LCE training that looks at how local authorities can do high quality engagement on a limited budget.
6. Take the time you think you need, double it and add a month
We were flexible with time frames in the LCE programme where we could — extending mentoring time, and taking more time to do practical delivery than originally planned. Even so, it made me realise that working with local authorities — especially when working across different teams — takes way longer than you’d imagine. Especially with sign off processes and competing workloads of the incredible officers doing local climate engagement. You can’t expect to be able to do things overnight.
7. Minimum requirements as well as good practice principles?
At Involve, we tend to talk about good practice rather than best practice. Why? Because there are lots of different ways of getting to the same outcome, and what is ‘best’ can change depending on the context and it is always changing. I’ve long thought about whether we need to look at a quality mark or accreditation for quality public engagement in local authorities. But an interesting question that surfaced in our external evaluation was the potential need for having a set of minimum standards for doing local climate engagement work. Would ‘just’ doing better consultation — rather than involving, collaborating or empowering using the IAP2 spectrum — be good enough for LCE and similar projects, or should we be focusing on engagement types on which residents have a greater impact on the decision? This led me to think about what level of engagement would be acceptable for Involve and our partners to do considering the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. The jury is still out — a discussion to be continued.
8. Face-to-face networking doesn’t get old
We heard from several local authority officers from our Coaching Group that they valued the networking opportunity with other local authorities, especially in person through our offline training sessions. We were told this was especially true of local authorities who shared a training space with local authorities who weren’t their immediate neighbours (with whom they might already work). The in-person networking may have also kept people engaged in the online Coaching Group peer learning sessions, which had consistent levels of participation throughout the programme. I wonder if there is appetite for a wider local authority climate engagement network?
9. Local authorities' extreme resource constraints are real
Local authorities that I worked with weren’t only feeling the squeeze from cuts to budgets, but halts on staff recruitment and spending freezes. There was sometimes so little available budget that a local authority couldn’t get approval for a budget to get drinks and snacks for engagement activities. The work that local authority officers are doing under such challenging conditions is a testament to their drive and commitment to tackling climate change. But fundamentally it is the responsibility of national government to take seriously the climate crisis and engagement — funding not only this work, but other invaluable work that local authorities do. As a result, we need to make sure we can offer smaller-scale, budget-friendly options for local authorities doing local climate engagement work.
Reflection and next steps
The Local Climate Engagement pilot has given us a wealth of learning at Involve, from things that worked to those that didn't; some things we knew, issues the programme spotlighted, and even new discoveries. I’ve reflected a lot on what good looks like as part of this programme and especially I’ve found myself toying with the idea of a set of minimum standards for local authorities doing climate engagement, as well as quality standards. Even small changes can lead to longer-term impact.
I was asked a few weeks ago what my highlight of 2022/23 was at Involve. The moment that stood out in my mind was when I was mentoring a local authority through LCE. A new climate team member had started in the local authority towards the end of the programme, well after the training had taken place. One of the officers who took part in the training shared their takeaways and synthesised the key messages from the three-day training in five minutes to their new colleague — it was at that moment I felt like we had done our job.
We had the pleasure to work with some fantastic organisations to make this programme happen — Climate Outreach, Shared Future and UK100. LCE gave the participating local authorities training, hands-on support, mentoring, tailored resources, and peer learning to support their council officers and elected representatives. You can find out more about what the LCE offer is here. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the generous support of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK branch).
Want to find out more?
You can read the evaluation report and evaluation summary on the LCE project page. Keep your eyes peeled over the next few months for our new LCE Resource Bank, a toolkit of open source LCE materials for local authorities. UK100 will also be delivering events for local authorities over the next few months.
If you are interested in procuring LCE training, mentoring or hands on support, please get in touch at [email protected].