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

Meaningful participation for just transition

Climate change disproportionately impacts social groups, with the vulnerable, the elderly and sick being impacted most. In many cities this poses a particular challenge, as many of these groups are among the traditionally underrepresented groups in political processes – and as such are traditionally underserved and often systematically excluded communities – and often go unheard in decision-making around climate action.

Meaningfully engaging a wide range of voices can improve and increase legitimacy in places facing high levels of mistrust. At the same time, it improves solutions by integrating the needs of the people affected. Bottom-up and deliberative approaches like asset-based community development, co-creation or citizen's assemblies contribute to making citizens the need-identifiers, idea-generators and problem-solvers serving to legitimate their implementation, ideally in direct conversation.

Examples & Inspiration

NZC Best Practice Session on Citizens Engagement – Watch Bristol, Lyon, Parma and Guimaraes sharing their experiences on Citizen Engagement and Stakeholder Participation. Parma shares their experience in involving stakeholders in the creation of the Climate City Contract. Guimaraes shares their experiences on how to involve industry and local businesses. Lyon shares their process Agora 2030, showing a great example of ongoing participation in the climate transition. Lastly, Bristol presents their approach on how to develop climate strategies from a neighbourhood level with a focus on including traditionally underrepresented and marginalised groups.
Sztum’s Vision Workshop An innovative, inclusive workshop format, gathering Sztum's stakeholders, focusing on individual ideas about the Sztum future, related to the everyday life and environment of people taking part in the event to better understand the concept of climate neutrality and to co-create a common vision of Sztum in a climate-neutral future.
Amsterdam: Climate Democracy Model in Amsterdam The project focused on what is needed to achieve a decarbonised future in Amsterdam based on key principles of deeper and wider civic engagement for climate action, including collaboration amongst diverse actors, peer learning, and experimentation for new forms of governance.

Net Zero Cities Tools & Canvases

Day to Day Lifecycle: Infrastructuring Democracy - A major challenge for cities is determining when and how to initiate stakeholder participation. Often, project teams feel they must have every detail finalized before engaging stakeholders and/or the wider public, leading to missed opportunities for meaningful collaboration. The "Infrastructuring Democracy" canvas helps cities recognize that participation can serve various purposes and methods, and it can be initiated at any stage of a project's lifecycle, ensuring a more inclusive and adaptive approach to urban development. Access the Canvas here
The Engagement Building Blocks offer a visual, collaborative, and playful way to learn and implement frameworks for designing citizen and urban stakeholder engagement processes. It can be used to explore alternative ways forward, assess needs, and reach agreement on key aspects between different stakeholders before you start the detailed design
Civic Enviroment Mapping Service - canvases & guide collection - Mapping civic environments is the first step to visualize various individuals, groups and organizations, their roles, relationships, influence and impact on the city’s climate neutrality transition journey. This collection, provides a synthesized NZC Civic Engagement Mapping Tool and an additional range of curated mapping canvases which Transition Teams in the Mission Cities can implement in both physical and online workshop settings. These tools are delivered as a package with a 'Civic Engagement Mapping approach', which provides the guidebook to select, implement and mainstream mapping in city climate neutrality planning processes.
Vision Workshop Toolbox The idea behind Vision Workshops is to bring together representatives of different groups (the general public, city administration, and/or schools) in their local context to make the concept of climate neutrality accessible to the population and to develop a shared vision for a future that is climate neutral.

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. Community wealth building and public-commons partnerships reimagine economic relations as distributed and rooted in communities.

Examples & Inspiration

Bristols Pilot Project: Net Zero Investment Co-Innovation Lab: Bristol’s Climate Strategy identifies the need for innovative finance mechanisms as a systemic requirement for the decarbonisation of the city. The Bristols Pilot project is to create a Net Zero Investment Co-Innovation Lab to empower citizens, communities and local business to invest in and benefit from an accelerated just transition to net zero.
EcoHouse Antwerp: Ecohouse is a one-stop-shop advice and demonstration center for sustainable building and living run by the City of Antwerp (Belgium). Its focus is on energy reduction and using renewable energy. It is open to the general public, with a substantive part of its work focused on more vulnerable groups. It offers workshops and advice on energy retrofitting, as well as both short and long term solutions for saving energy and money.
Braga: You Decide! You Decide is a participatory budget initiative aimed at promoting greater participation of young people and at increasing their contribution to the development of the city.

Activating the Local Ecosystem through a Network Approach

Building impactful, purpose-driven relationships and processes among local actors allows collective work to emerge toward transformational systems change. While one-off engagements or project-specific initiatives can spark connections, it is the development of genuine long-term relationships around real projects with processes that allow transformational change to flourish and thrive. Genuine relationships allow for informal, yet critical exchanges, where feedback can be honest and co-creation flourishes. As trust grows, a space for real collaboration emerges, enabling actors to challenge one another, take risks, and innovate together. In this way, networks of cooperation are formed, where stakeholders not only identify challenges but also generate solutions. Purposefully cultivating these relationships helps ensure that collaboration is not only possible, but sustained, unlocking new potential for cities to thrive.

Examples & Inspiration

Agora Lyon 2030 - Established in early 2023, Agora brings together 65 stakeholders, representing a range of perspectives in the region. The aim is to work collectively to co-construct a territorial contract for the climate – the “Lyon 2030 climate pact”. The aim is to develop a “Lyon 2030 cooperation and commitment agreement” among the stakeholders. Watch Lyon present Lyon 2030 in the NZC Best Practice Session,
Barcelona Health Hub – Barcelona Health Hub serves as an exemplary case of how a city successfully built an ecosystem of over 500 stakeholders, including startups, public and private healthcare institutions, universities, large corporations, and investors, all aimed at accelerating the digital transformation of the health sector. A key takeaway is their ability to establish a shared space of opportunity that unites diverse stakeholders, each with varying interests, to work collaboratively under a common mission and vision.
Valencia Missions 2030 – Valencia’s approach to their Climate Mission is rooted in systemic innovation, structuring their climate action into a series of smaller, thematic missions (Healthy City, Shared City, Entrepreneurial City, and Sustainable City). They have created open calls for participation and established collaboration spaces and infrastructures that engage a broad constellation of stakeholders from the quintuple helix. This approach promotes distributed leadership and collective action towards achieving climate neutrality. For further information, see the Valencia Mission 2020 website or read the Climate City Contract of Valencia.

Net Zero Cities Tools & Canvases

The Scaffolding Emergence Canvas is a tool that supports cities that aim to create a distributed network for change. It guides municipalities beyond one-off engagement, fostering a collaborative ecosystem where cities work closely with frontrunners to shape and maintain a dynamic network for urban transformation. The canvas guides participants through the Quintuple Helix, obliging them to choose to which helix any stakeholder is part of.
Strategies for Designing Spaces for Encounter - Spaces for Encounter enable citizens and stakeholders with different types and levels of power to interact in carefully facilitated ways which can have a powerful effect on bridging divides and creating impact. They are spaces where citizens can encounter various stakeholders and be included in the transition to climate neutrality, both within the framework of the spaces and more broadly in the city’s work towards climate neutrality. This framework provides a way for thinking about the values and process of engagement that are needed in the spaces. It is not necessarily a step-by-step guide on how to create these spaces, but a guide on what you need to consider and possess to create Spaces for Encounter.

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