QUICK READS

Quick Reads are short overviews of key NetZeroCities concepts providing essential information in a practical and visual way. More comprehensive resources and additional information will be available in the knowledge repository.

Citizens Participation and Stakeholder Engagement

It will require a possible but unprecedented transition, in terms of speed and scale, to reach climate-neutrality by 2030. Local governments will need to act together with business leaders, knowledge institutions, disruptive innovators, artists, civil society, and citizens, to radically multiply everyone's collective actions towards climate-neutrality. This requires deeper and wider engagement and participation of citizens and urban stakeholders in the design, development, investment, implementation and monitoring of climate actions.

Transitioning an entire city to climate-neutrality requires a recognition of the different perspectives, interests and climate vulnerability of each community and stakeholder. No single individual or group can bring about the change on their own, everyone’s voice needs to matter. Reaching climate-neutrality requires the creativity, passion, energy and drive of citizens and stakeholders, who need to become partners, allies and co-orchestrators in order for change to occur. Cities across Europe are already building new democratic approaches that are people-centred, committed to community and climate resilience, and respond to the local context. This will be the foundation of social innovation but also more widely of effective, legitimate, and socially just city action for climate-neutrality, creating strong and healthier communities.

Key principles for citizen and urban stakeholder engagement

Engage deeply

We are seeing cities starting to open up decision-making, policymaking, and climate action. Such approaches engage citizens deeply, take their input into policy seriously, and enable meaningful, diverse participation in all other stages of climate action - from problem framing to implementation, assessment, and learning, in order to create meaningful impact.

Build democratic infrastructure

Too often, citizen engagement begins and ends as a series of events. To have the highest impact, it is critical to take a long-term, sustainable view of citizen engagement and consider it as democratic infrastructure: sustainable, ongoing exchange, purposefully built to last. This approach goes beyond one-off citizen engagement events or consultations, in favour of ongoing, embedded processes and procedures that become part of the fabric of a city.

Trust

In order to engage deeply, there needs to be mutual trust among governments, citizens, and urban stakeholders. Participation is most effective when participants trust the process in which they are participating, and the impact their participation will have. This can be achieved, for example, by working transparently, being clear about mutual expectations, needs and ‘humble governance’ that recognises that no one has the complete answer for complex issues.

Be ambitious and reimagine

The nature of the climate neutrality challenge requires ambitious approaches to citizen engagement. As well as engaging with citizens to strengthen existing democratic or policy processes, approaches are needed to challenge and reimagine those processes, creating new institutional infrastructure where needed, to tackle the barriers that democracies face in addressing the climate crisis.

Focus on fit for purpose

Citizen engagement methods do not work without an understanding of the broader context and without a clear purpose for the engagement. Any approach to citizen engagement is only as good as its rationale, implementation, and impact on affected communities.

Inspiration

Future-focused for long term solutions

City governments have started to reimagine their city life with healthier and more liveable spaces for citizens. It is difficult for people living in high carbon-consuming societies to imagine a different way of living. Using futures thinking can help people to imagine what that way of living might look like, and what we need to do to get there (seen in Amsterdam, Dublin, Sztum).

Participative finance for new economic relationships

New economic opportunities, enabled by supportive policy, are crucial. By collectively engaging citizens in new ways of managing resources, they become active agents and co-creators of value in the transition towards net-zero. unity wealth building and public-commons partnerships reimagine economic relations as distributed and rooted in communities (seen in Antwerp, Barcelona, Lisbon, Manchester, Vienna).

Meaningful participation for resilience

Climate change disproportionately impacts underserved and systematically excluded communities. Meaningfully engaging a wide range of voices, can improve and increase legitimacy in places facing high levels of mistrust. Bottom-up and deliberative approaches like asset-based community development, co-creation or citizens’ assemblies contribute to making citizens the need-identifiers, idea-generators and problem-solvers serving to legitimate their implementation, ideally in direct conversation (seen in Bizkaia, Barcelona, Niš, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, Toronto).