Citizen policy entrepreneurship in UK local government climate emergency declarations

Abstract

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

Understanding the motivations and implications of climate emergency declarations in cities: The case of Italy

“…To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the first investigation of the Climate Emergency Declaration movement in cities, which also addresses the state of existing local climate planning. This complements and enriches the few recent studies conducted on cities in Australia, New Zealand [35] and the United Kingdom [38] that have analysed new action plans as a results of CEDs.…”

“…The development of post-CED climate emergency plans is a very recent and not yet widespread activity, as can be seen from the fact that only a few studies have focused on this aspect so far. Included in this exception are studies by Davidson et al [35], who analysed the new action plans implemented by two cities (Darebin, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand), and by Harvey-Scholes C [38]. who studied 237 local authorities in the UK, showing that a concrete action plan for decarbonization followed the declaration in most of the CEDs in this country.…”

“…It is therefore evident that scientific studies to date have not fully grasped the potential of CEDs adopted at all jurisdictional levels around the world, particularly the many CEDs adopted at urban and local levels. The few studies currently available focus on the few countries where the CED movement appears to be geographically concentrated [32], namely mainly the United Kingdom [38] and Australia [39]. There is a lack of studies on the CED movement and its effect in other countries, particularly within the European Union.…”

PV, or not PV: using backcasting to explore policy, market and governance implications of local decarbonisation pathways such as urban PV

“…UK, 2021). In almost nine out of ten (89%) cases declarations have been followed by climate action plans, and in over two-thirds (69%) a public commitment or aim to reduce emissions (Harvey-Scholes, 2019). Notably, in almost all of these authorities the goal is to achieve net zero emissions or close to it, and many have committed to achieving this by 2030 -two decades ahead of the target for the UK as a whole set by the Government (UK Government, 2019).…”

Energy efficiency, housing, and economic policy

“…One of them are so-called change agents, which can be conceptualized as different types of individual policy actors. Besides the notion of policy entrepreneurs, which is commonly referred to in public policy research (Arnold, 2022;Harvey-Scholes et al, 2022;Petridou et al, 2021;Tang & He, 2023;Taylor et al, 2023), Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) have introduced the concepts of leaders and pioneers. In this EPA issue, Watanabe (2023) provides an in-depth analysis of wind energy policy-making within the context of the German energy transition ("Energiewende").…”