Policy entrepreneurship theory seeks to explain how actors, institutions, actions and interactions influence policy makers and policy outcomes; however, the role of citizens in this process remains largely unarticulated. Adopting a conception of policy entrepreneurship as a (distributed) pattern of agency rather than the actions of an individual, we analyse the development of local government climate emergency declarations (CEDs) (many of which visibly involved citizen advocacy). This analysis expands on the role of citizens in policy change and provides evidence of how citizen entrepreneurs interact collaboratively with more traditional forms of policy elites, in this case local elected representatives. Since 2018 hundreds of local governments in the United Kingdom (UK) have issued CEDs in a surge of expressions of local climate ambition. Whilst CEDs have attracted attention from scholars, the underlying dynamics and politics which drove the adoption of these policies, including the role played by citizens, remain unexplored in the literature. Interviews with councillors, council officers, and citizens reveal that citizens carry out a range of activities related to policy entrepreneurship, including problem framing, identifying solutions, networking and building coalitions, and

HighlightsCommitments within local government CEDs chart a course for faster community-level decarbonisation with participatory democracy. To move forward faster, local approaches must be equitable, coordinated and sufficiently resourced and empowered.

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Pioneer cities have demonstrated a willingness and capability to decarbonise local heat systems, but support is needed to scale up action. Heat decarbonisation is not simply a technical challenge, but also a political and social one; stakeholders must inform decisions about appropriate technological and policy solutions and will, in turn, be affected by them. Taking three dimensions of stakeholders, technology, and policy, a structured approach which centres stakeholders is presented to help local government to collaboratively find appropriate technology and policy solutions, both at the strategic scale across the municipality and in localised pilot projects, and explores how to initialise and support heat decarbonisation in more cities.