Citizens and urban stakeholders

1. EmpowerMed The EmpowerMed project aims to address energy poverty in the Mediterranean region, by empowering affected communities, especially women, through engagement, support and policy recommendations.

2. People’s Policy on Child Wellbeing The case was a collaborative and deliberative process in South Australia which trialled a citizen-led approach to policymaking. Instead of politicians designing policy and presenting it to the public for approval, this case turned that process on its head by supporting citizens to develop policy themselves.

3. Landforce, Community wealth building Landforce is an organisation based in Pittsburgh, USA, that provides underserved community members training and employment in environmental work. It combines workforce development training with environmental stewardship employment. 

4. TransformTO: Multisolving in Toronto A climate action strategy to reduce Toronto’s greenhouse gas emission by 80% by 2050 with the collaboration of experts and people living in Toronto.  

Methods:  

1. Citizens’ Assembly A citizens’ assembly is a participatory process where a randomly selected group of citizens learn about and deliberate upon a specific issue or policy, and collectively come up with recommendations for decisionmakers.

2. Co-production Co-production is a collaborative approach to decision-making and service design where providers, users and all relevant stakeholders work together to reach a collective outcome. The approach is value-driven and built on the principle that those who are affected by a service are best placed to help design it. In practice, it means that service beneficiaries are not only consulted, but are part of the conception, steering and management of services. 

3. Futures Thinking Futures Thinking is a broad umbrella of approaches that support people to think about, cope with, and imagine what is likely to happen, and what could happen, in the future. 

4. People’s Policy People’s Policy is a method of citizen-led policy development, designed to generate long-term solutions to complex problems in a non-partisan, collaborative way. 

5. Community Wealth Building An economic development model that transform local economies based on communities having ownership and control of their assets. It aims to restructure the economy to make it more democratic.   

6. Participatory Budgeting Participatory budgeting (PB) processes empower communities to make decisions on a city’s budget and spending. PB can be combined with deliberation to ensure a robust, inclusive process.  

1. Resilient BOTU In Rotterdam, the Resilient Bospolder-Tussendijken 2028 initiative has been working with the local community since 2019 to leverage the energy transition as a means to build social cohesion and community capacity. The initiative applies the Asset Based Community Development approach and is working with local residents, informal social networks and bottom-up initiatives to (1) build an information and support network for the residents, (2) create technical capacity, local energy jobs and vocational training, and (3) address energy poverty and debt, and explore affordable energy options. 

2. Berlin Kiezblocks Similar to Living Streets, Berlin’s Kiezblocks are an initiative to limit traffic, improve road safety, and improve air quality at the neighbourhood level. However, they aim to establish both permanent and temporary spaces. They use participatory urban planning processes to divert traffic and plan, propose, and implement bike lanes and other communal spaces. They can be implemented by citizens, civil-society organizations, or governments.

3. Living Streets of Ghent Living Streets is a series of real-life experiments whereby residents can temporarily turn their street into a place where people feel comfortable spending time once there are fewer cars and more social interaction. These experiments also help local administrations to ensure that new neighbourhoods are always designed to have ‘living streets’.

4. Community Forest in Nepal, Social Equity in Community The use of Community Forests (CFs) to address social equity in forest management, namely in the distribution of benefits from the forest resources, good governance in decision making processes and the inclusion of marginalised groups. 

5. Wards Corner, London (Public-Commons Partnerships) Wards Corner uses PCP to establish a community-controlled asset to revitalise the surrounding area. PCPs are radical democratic models that encourages councils and other public bodies to work with communities to design, manage and expand the commons.   

6. Järva Dialog Järva Dialog, part of Stockholm City's Sustainable Järva initiative to improve energy efficiency of homes, enabled residents to have a say in deicision being made about renovations.   

7. BESTGRID (stakeholder involvement) BESTGRID was a project with the aim to improve public acceptance for grids on a local level and bring together stakeholders from civil society, academia and the energy sector to understand concerns of new electricity grids being built in communities. BESTGRID acted as an exchange of best practice approaches of transparent stakeholder participation in power grid planning.

Methods:  

1. Collective Advisory Assemblies  Collective Advisory Assemblies (CAA) bring together communities affected by an issue, such as energy poverty, to receive ongoing support from activists and others affected by the same issue. It is a horizontal approach to participation, meaning that its focused is engaging affected communities engaging with each other. 

2. Energy Communities Energy communities refer to a wide range of collective energy actions that involve citizens’ participation in the energy system. They can be understood as a way to organise collective energy actions around open, democratic participation and governance, and the provision of benefits for the members or the local community. 

3. Natural Gas-Free Homes Residents go through several steps towards a natural gas-free home. We call this the customer journey to gas-free living. 

4. Public-Commons Partnership Public-Commons Partnerships are collective associations of state, community and private interests that manage and develop assets and investments in a local community, with that community’s interests and voice driving economic development. 

5. Tactical Urbanism Tactical urbanism is an approach to community engagement and place-making. Tactical urbanism projects are physical urban interventions that are often interim and pop-up in nature, to catalyze long-term change for more liveable streets and spaces. 

6. Civic Labs Civic labs is a method for bottom-up, local innovation that creates platforms wherein citizens together with other citizens, private and government stakeholders define common challenges and co-create solutions together. The application of civic labs is versatile and be initiated by governments, universities, non-profits, private companies, citizens or partnerships between stakeholders.

7. Living Labs A cycle of activities comprised of co-design, exploration, experimentation and evaluation that are repeated throughout the stages of an innovative process. They are in real-life environments based on user co-creation, placing citizens at the centre of innovation. Living Labs act as intermediaries among citizens, companies and government agencies.  

8. Citizens Asset Program Citizens Asset is the transfer of public assets’ use and management to non-profit collectives. Based on the logic that public things (municipal property) can become communal (citizen patrimony) through shared management. This is a reinvention of public properties which also provides tools and training to the communities responsible for the management. Citizen assets can be premises, buildings, facilities or public spaces.

1. Environmental monitoring committees in mining contexts An environmental monitoring committee based in Panama that works on water resources. The committee is made up of volunteers who help oversee the evaluation of water. The committee has helped the mining company take responsibility and change practices to reduce pollution of the water.

Methods:  

1. Citizens Science Citizen science (CS) engages people in research and monitoring and helps expand peoples' knowledge of the subject. Citizen science is often used in studies of biodiversity and the environment, in which people voluntarily collect environmental data, monitor the samples and interpret the data.

2. Transition Street Groups of friends and neighbours meet every few weeks with a practical workbook to make easy changes in how they use energy, water, food, packaging and transport. 

1. Paris’ Standing Citizens' Assembly The permanent Paris Citizens' Assembly is the first full-scale institutionalisation of a representative public deliberation, and it's composed of 100 residents of Paris selected by civic lottery.

2. CDMX’ Crowdsourced Constitution Through crowdsourcing, Mexico City granted a voice and autonomy to the citizens to generate a new constitution. Online petitions, surveys, kiosks, general assemblies and data collection centres served as spaces to acquire these opinions and recommendations. 

3. Climate and energy model region An initiative to develop large-scale solutions for affordable and reliable energy systems in Austria while focusing on bottom-up approaches where regions develop their own ways of enhancing renewable energies.