This Support Pathway outlines approaches to fostering community engagement, building a shared understanding, and promoting co-creation of climate action by activating an inclusive local ecosystem for change.
This Support Pathway focuses on:
- How to work with multiple climate commitments: Involving a range of targets and actions led by your city governments to create meaningful change.
- Stakeholder involvement: Achieving your city’s climate goals requires the involvement of everyone in your local ecosystem - civil society organisations, citizens, local businesses, knowledge institutions, and many more.
- Empowering local stakeholders: To effectively engage with your local stakeholders, it is essential to build capacity and knowledge among them.
This Support Pathway helps address challenges related to building an inclusive ecosystem for change and social innovation.
Key Challenges:
- Limited citizen empowerment and involvement: Your city tends to prioritise consultative and informative practices but lacks a focus on co-creation and co-design initiatives that truly empower citizens in climate action.
- Administrative capacity gaps: Your city faces significant gaps in administrative capacity and skills, impacting its ability to engage with citizens effectively, foster public-private collaborations, and communicate well with the public.
- Applying new methods and approaches: Going beyond knowledge-sharing on engagement methods and best practices can be difficult. Effectively applying these lessons in your city’s unique context presents its own challenges.
- Multi-stakeholder governance hurdles: Implementing a multi-stakeholder governance model poses a challenge for your city.
Stages of the Climate Transition Map
This support pathway relates to the following stages of the Climate Transition Map:
- Activate inclusive ecosystem for change
- Build a strong mandate
It supports your city in addressing challenges related to community engagement while boosting capacity and skills to develop and implement co-creation and co-design strategies for social innovation.
Through this pathway, you will learn how to build a strong mandate within your local ecosystem, enabling meaningful collaboration and leveraging knowledge, skills and perspectives from diverse disciplines and stakeholders. It will also assist you in creating new collaborative governance structures and networks.
Learn
Social Innovation Toolkit
A guideline and set of tools to support and boost social innovation initiatives.
Social Innovation Quick Read
Core definition and key principles of social innovation.
Full Collection of Social Innovation Resources
All resources created by NZC are included in this document, including (1) quick read; (2) video; (3) Social Innovation Actionable Pathways map; (4) NZC Seasonal Schools resource; (5) Social Innovation Learning Club; (6) case studies; (7) methods to implement social innovation in cities; (8) Social Innovation assessment: process and outcome indicators; (9) NZC Deliverables on Social Innovation; and (10) scientific publications. Access the full range of existing services and resources.
NZC catalogue of social innovation indicators
The Report on Indicators & assessment methods for social innovation action plans explains the purpose, framework, methods, and tools for evaluating social innovation in action plans across 30 pilot cities. Explore the indicators to identify how they can support social engagement in your city.
Act
Engagement Strategy Tool
The Engagement Strategy Tools assist cities in identifying the right NZC services to best engage and activate citizens and stakeholders within their local ecosystem. The services to help support engagement.
Knowledge Repository: Social innovatio and engagment
The knowledge repository contains numerous methods and case studies on social innovation, stakeholder engagement, and staekholder-led solutions, applicable to different steps of the cities’ climate transition journey. Simply access the knowledge repository and filter by themes under ‘Social and Economy’ in the tags
Methods for meetings facilitation
This page gathers a comprehensive collection of methods for implementing Social Innovation in projects and cities, structured to guide users through each critical phase of the process. The methods are divided into distinct phases: Analyse Context to understand the current environment and identify key challenges, Reframe the Problem to approach issues from fresh perspectives, Envision Alternatives to explore creative and viable solutions, Prototype and Experiment to test these solutions in practical settings, and Scale to expand successful initiatives for broader impact.
Connect
Capability-building programme
The capability-building programme will include an online course for civil servants, with one of the modules dedicated to citizen engagement as well as social innovation. Additional services developed under the programme could include support for engaging the private sector, social businesses, organizations and universities/research institutions, addressing the barrier identified by cities.
Online peer discussion groups
Discussion groups, although domain specific, will also address citizen and stakeholder engagement, and social innovation. This would enable cities to learn from Mission Cities, particularly those with pilot projects focusing on stakeholder engagement, to share their experiences and best practices.
Group Study Visits
The study visits enable cities to learn directly from Mission Cities that have successfully implemented projects and initiatives focused on ecosystem engagement. Cities learn from Mission Cities’ practical experiences with collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches, co-creation methods, and innovative multi-stakeholder governance structures that empower stakeholder involvement.
Twinning Programme
The Twinning Programme between Mission Cities and other cities enables all cities to partner with peers for guidance and support. This collaboration supports in implementing more integrated climate planning, creating portfolios of transformative actions, and connecting various systems to better understand challenges and opportunities for change. Calls for twin cities are launched periodically, join the NetZeroCities Portal and newsletter to stay updated on collaboration opportunities.
NetZeroCities Community of Practice
While engaging local partners in their climate actions, cities can also connect these non-city actors to the broader Community of Practice of NetZeroCities. This group includes private companies, universities, NGOs, and independent entities. The Community of Practice activities foster peer learning among these actors, encouraging innovation and collaboration.
Other relevant initiatives and programmes
- Multi-Level Governance in (Climate) Action – Co-creating policy solutions to tackle climate change (October 2021): A guide to Multi-Level Governance as a key to strengthen a variety of processes, especially supporting and accelerating climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as effectively tackling energy poverty, providing a coherent framework for the just transition and enhancing many other crucial issues. What does MLG mean in practice? What role does it play in policy-making and in accelerating climate and energy action?
- Local Climate Pacts: A youth-inclusive green future for Sunderland (December 2023): Sunderland (UK) has brought city partners together to cooperate in reaching the city’s jointly agreed Carbon Neutrality goals and implement the city-wide Low Carbon Framework. The 2030 Shadow Board brings together senior representatives from partners of all sectors across Sunderland as well as representatives from the city’s youth climate forum, the Environmental, Green and Sustainable (EGS) Group.
- City Labs are community spaces where people and organizations come together to experiment and collaborate on projects that address important city goals. These labs focus on solving real problems by exploring practical actions and solutions that benefit the community. They also aim to shift how people think about these issues and inspire new ways to tackle them. Examples include Valencia - Las Naves; Bristol City Lab; Mannheim City Lab; Leuven 2030 Urban Lab). To see if this approach could work for your city, look at the success stories from these cities and evaluate how they align with your local needs and goals.
- City Roadmaps: City Roadmaps for achieving Net Zero are detailed plans supported by programs and led by facilitators. Facilitators help turn the plans into real actions with measurable results, making sure to involve citizens and other stakeholders throughout the process. Consult the City Roadmap developed in Leuven for inspiration.
- City as a platform: An open platform, which can be both digital and physical (often linked with neighbourhood labs), is created by the city to support and encourage entrepreneurship, social impact investment, and community development. This platform brings together public and private organizations, as well as profit and non-profit groups to strengthen the city's ability to address urgent needs and social challenges in a top-down and bottom-up approach. Learn from examples in Torino, Bologna, Brescia and Helsinki.
- #WirvsVirus: An Open Social Innovation initiative that mobilised people from all sectors (civil society, government and private sector) to address the COVID-19 crisis. The programme consisted of a 48-hr hackathon to develop ideas and an implementation programme (130 teams for 6-months) to support social innovators to turn ideas into solutions. #WirVsVirus identified pressing challenges related to COVID-19, such as how to quickly digitalize health-care services, how to help citizens of all ages to cope with lockdown-induced isolation, and how to respond to increasing instances of domestic violence. Twenty-eight thousand citizens with a broad spectrum of personal and professional backgrounds participated. To consider if this programme could be adapted to your city’s context, consult the lessons learned here, Policy Brief here, and more examples here.