a b s t r a c tThe historical focus of renewable energy policy in the UK, as in most nations, has been on supporting deployment in renewable energy sources of electricity. The adoption of ambitious EU wide targets for renewable energy has forced greater consideration of renewable energy sources of heat (RES-H). The UK pushed ahead rapidly in considering different policy options and legislating a new instrument, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) to support RES-H, a form of tariff mechanism designed with the specifics of RES-H in mind, though translation into application has been slow. The evolutionary process which led to the current policy instrument is considered, along with the need to consider other elements to work with it. This represents a new and novel application of policy to an area where there are few examples of large-scale policies which go beyond direct capital subsidy.

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Continued growth of the low-carbon economy during the recent economic downturn has driven increased focus on the role of this sector in re-establishing the dynamism of the UK economy. At the same time, local economic governance has undergone a rapid phase of reorganisation with the development of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). This article examines the approach of LEPs to the low-carbon economy, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with LEPs and other local economic development actors. It reviews the extent to which LEPs are prioritising low-carbon growth and concludes that, whilst some areas are embedding green growth, progress is highly variable due to uncertainties regarding the national decarbonisation agenda and the lack of an explicit requirement from Government. A lack of consensus regarding what constitutes green growth and a focus by LEPs on large-scale low-carbon projects may be limiting progress in areas, such as energy efficiency, that may deliver multiple economic, environmental and social objectives. Conflicting themes of centralisation and decentralisation are also evident in the low-carbon policy landscape, highlighting a need for greater dialogue between the central and local scale to explore the diversity of local low-carbon economy pathways.

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