Community-led Engagement on Net-zero (CEoN)

Developing a Grassroots Sustainable Futures: Collective Participation in Community-Based Cultural Organisations

1 Overview:

This research is funded by British Academy, we (Dr. Lee Barron, Dr. Jiayi Jin and Prof. Shengfeng Qin from Northumbria University)  have been working closely with local cultural organisations (like The Word, National Centre for the Written Word, Newcastle City Library, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums) and local communities in both Newcastle and South Shields to develop an outline of the agenda for advocating ‘net-zero’ cities, and demonstration of the sustainable development with a co-creation toolkit.

Net-zero cities are not just about carbon – they are about economics and finance, governance and planning, social change, technology innovation, psychology and culture and more.  Most net-zero pathways focus on technical energy-economy models, and then try to fit policy and engage communities around them.  Experience shows this may not work well, if at all. So we need another way to fit all these together, with ‘joined-up thinking’, with all involved. This is the role of synergistic thinking and the toolkit. Recent experience has shown the role of creative collaboration in turning complex inter-connected problems into opportunities.

This research toolkit contains:

  • brief outline of the net-zero cities agenda
  • outline of the synergistic methods for collaborative learning thinking and co-creation.

2 Net Zero Carbon City Agenda

Cities around the world proclaim their policies for the climate / low-carbon transition, but for the general public, few have much knowledge of their own carbon cycle with its many stocks and flows, with three basic types:

  • The direct cycle starts with local burning of fossil fuels, releasing carbon to the atmosphere, with some re-circulation into oceans, soils or vegetation.
  • An indirect cycle burns the fossil fuel outside the city or region, to make electricity for the urban energy mix.
  • Thirdly come many kinds of local or regional cycles, stocks and flows: land-use and forestry, agriculture and food chains, bio-fuels and bio-mass, imported products which end up in landfills, carbon embedded in buildings and infrastructure, these are not only physical flows but accounting flows, political or economic commitments, such as carbon offsets.

There’s an important difference between the first two, which are accounted and targeted by production sectors, and the third which is more about consumption. The UK carbon accounts look good on paper, only because most heavy industries moved to Asia and the products are reimported (Harvey, 2022). High-carbon goods imported into the UK should also be subject to new tariffs, to help ensure other countries are fulfilling their obligations to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions as well as the UK.

To put together an effective agenda for net-zero cities, we look for the ‘synergies’ between different domains with local communities from South Shields.

3 Building effective and meaningful platforms for a collective participation

People and the way they interact are critical to cities. A driver for this research is to create a suitable platform for information exchange and open discussion, which encompasses people, knowledge, learning and education. We hope different society sectors can be involved and participate in this conversation. Citizen participation is believed to gain more effectiveness, more efficiency, and increase the overall satisfaction and involvement (Voorberg, et al, 2014). According to Viale Pereira, et all (2017), there’s a growing interest, both in governmental practice and in academic research, in the transformed ‘relations between the state/government and citizens enhanced by the creative platforms, especially in public participation or decision-making with citizens participation’, which is also pointed out by Berntzen & Johannessen (2016), Khan, et al., (2017) and Pfeifer, et al., (2021).

With the aim to create a more open, social, communicative, interactive and user-centered platform for meaningful public participation, services and policies are due to be designed through a cooperation with citizens and external organisations instead of only by the government (Meijer, et al, 2012). The participation of end users can be indicated as co-creation. Especially this co-creation is planned between multiple stakeholders. The innovativeness of different parties is combined in these collaborations. It is believed that ‘citizen-centred multi-perspectives offer a promising route to a more inclusive social policy for the future (Kabeer, 2004). This also fosters the knowledge and innovation potential of citizens (Lee, et all, 2014). According to Lee, et all (2014), the open public platform helps to facilitate the coordination of ‘peoples participatory living-playing-working activities’. This can promote social interactions which involve the participation of citizens in public life, collective decision-making and strengthen the participation level of citizens. To promote ideas like net-zero cities, it demands open innovation platforms where citizens and communities are able to engage with each other and empower each other which intensifies the possibilities of co-creation. 

4. Co-creation Tookit

A ‘Net-Zero City’ has to somehow connect environmental management with social, technology, ecology, economic, political and cultural issues. Meanwhile there are other ‘grand challenges’ such as artificial intelligence or social inequality, which are equally complex, inter-connected, and controversial. What can be done?

‘Synergistics’ – the science and art of working with synergies – has been developed for such challenges. It provides practical methods and tools, to help explore and enable ‘collective intelligence’. It can work with multi-stakeholders like cultural organisations, institutions, business models, networks or communities.

To explore the potential for collective intelligence, calls for creative and collaborative and visionary thinking. Toolkit should cover a flexible set of techniques with 4 stages:

1) System mapping: mapping baseline problems from the local for all participants (Co-learning)
2) Scenario mapping: mapping drivers of change & alternative futures (Co-knowledge)
3) Synergy mapping: design of opportunities, synergies, innovations (Co-creation)
4) Strategy mapping: design of practical pathways, road-maps, policies (Co-production)