What if more strategies were developed collaboratively and through participatory approaches?

What if they drew on the widest possible range of insight and data to develop strategic goals and actions, including the lived experience of those involved in trying to deliver change in that field? What if the process addressed where the strategy should sit and who should have accountability for its implementation, and gathered support along the way?

Wouldn’t that mean the strategy was less likely to sit on a shelf, gathering dust, as so many strategies seem to do? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be co-owned and held – and therefore more likely to mobilise action amongst those that need to be involved in implementing it?

At Collaborate, we strongly believe in the power of collaborative problem-solving when it comes to the complex, place-based, systemic challenges we face today, and that includes how we form strategies to address these challenges.

As a collaborative process to co-create a Local Retrofit Strategy, the Local Area Retrofit Accelerator (LARA) has been a testing ground for these ideas.

There is no more pressing need for taking bold collective action than in the challenge of making our homes fit for the future. So we were pleased to be asked to work with decarbonisation charity the MCS Foundation to design and facilitate a pilot participatory process to develop Local Retrofit Strategies in four places in England.

The challenge is huge. A significant proportion of the UK’s housing leaks heat and wastes energy, leaving people living in cold, damp and unhealthy homes, Carbon emissions from homes make up nearly 25% of all carbon emissions in the UK. And to meet our current targets we need to decarbonise 27 million homes across the UK by 2050. That’s one million per year, or 30 to 80 homes per day that need to be ‘retrofitted’, depending on the place and the state of the housing stock. And it means significantly accelerating our current pace of retrofit. At the moment efforts to renovate and improve our homes are patchy, fragmented and dependent on short term funding schemes, with no single organisation tasked with leading the effort.

Retrofitting is defined as the introduction of new materials, products and technologies into an existing building to reduce the energy (and therefore carbon footprint) needed to occupy it. This upgrading of our homes can also help to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve energy security and contribute to healthier environments.

The gains are big, but so are the hurdles: a shortage of skills, a big trust deficit, a massive funding gap, a failing market and a fragmented retrofit system. Strategic leadership and accountability gaps are also evident. Some of these hurdles can and must be overcome through national policy and funding. But it’s clear that much of the action that needs to be taken to decarbonise is best planned and led at a local level.

The Skidmore Review in 2023 found local action to be key to delivering net zero in the cheapest and most effective way possible:

‘Taking a more locally led, place-based approach can deliver a net zero transition with more local support, better tailoring to local needs, and bring economic and social benefits…because each community will have a different path to net zero, which local leaders are best placed to understand and shape.’

LARA was designed to test this assertion. Rather than assuming that identical retrofit action is needed everywhere, it takes a localised, co-designed approach, operating in four places: Hertfordshire, East Midlands (D2N2 area), Liverpool region and Surrey. By doing this, LARA partners expected better outcomes for all stakeholders, covering health, fuel poverty and decarbonisation.

One or more local government stakeholder or partnership hosted LARA in each place. We designed and facilitated workshops where stakeholders came together from across the local retrofit system: councils, landlords, skills providers, energy organisations, suppliers and community energy groups. They each developed the core elements of a Local Retrofit Strategy, with a shared vision, strategic goals and indicative actions.

Reflecting back on the LARA pilot, we learned a number of things about taking a participatory approach to strategy development for systemic change. Firstly, LARA reinforced what we know from other similarly emergent and collaborative work: the importance of being clear about the invitation and spending plenty of time at the start introducing the nature of the process and helping people feel comfortable with it.

Getting buy-in at each stage of the process is critical. People must see that their input is valued and that it’s possible to iterate and improve things live so that they are genuinely involved in wordsmithing and making choices. We tested agreement for key elements of the strategy: vision, mission, principles, goals and actions.

It was also critical that we diagnosed the current system and set the scene, and took the time to socialise and test it, recognising a need to keep adding to it. In each area, we began with producing a ‘locality assessment’: a review according to the retrofit system’s six pillars (thanks to design partner Dark Matter Labs for these): homes, technology, community, governance, skills and funding. The assessment was built from stakeholder interviews as well as published data, and a conversation with the locality’s core team and became the foundation of building a shared understanding of the system with stakeholders at the first workshop.

We also highlighted and learned from what’s already going on, and thought about how to spread (not scale) the principles and approaches that are already working, while also bringing in fresh ideas and expertise from elsewhere to inspire and inform the work locally.

Involving a diverse range of stakeholders was key to ensuring that the plans would be both practical and impactful, representing both the demand and supply sides of the system. We were ably supported across the process by MCSF’s grants team and partners (see here) in running the process and feeding in their extensive knowledge of retrofit where helpful – without undermining local ownership and decision-making.

Despite the obvious difficulties of bringing such a mix of stakeholders together – the thinkers and the doers, the technical experts and the big picture thinkers, the pessimists and the optimists – we saw relationships form, understanding grow and shared goals emerge through the process. In fact, the effectiveness of the process relied on getting as wide a range of perspectives as possible. The importance of time spent helping people to understand the perspectives of others can’t be underestimated; it’s essential that people break out of their silos.

Those who were openly sceptical of participatory processes or the ability of local actors to create change in this field became ardent supporters of the process and optimistic about real change happening. The experiential system game we adapted from Policy Lab and used in workshops helped to grow shared understanding, empathy and highlight opportunities for collaborative working. There was active demand in each area to join the working groups we hosted along with transition steering groups to keep the process moving forwards after we left. Read more about the Hertfordshire experience here.

We also learned that it’s worth starting to talk about future governance early; with system change there often isn’t a clear accountable body or lead organisation, so collaborative governance has to be designed alongside strategic goals and action plans. Not talking about governance undermines the process as people lose faith in the strategy being implemented.

Additionally, systems change strategies can’t be too fixed on specific actions. We developed broad strategic goals, pathways and indicative actions with the idea that stakeholders would then take a test and learn approach. We believe that governance should balance monitoring with learning and people should be prepared to adapt and iterate. Having the right data to understand what’s changing will be key.

Whilst elements of the LARA process (such as the six pillars) are rather specific to retrofit, the process and approach is transferable to practically any system challenge that needs to bring multiple stakeholders together to collaborate on strategic action across a place – especially in our creative approach getting people involved and enthused about a strategy, which can be a dull thing to engage with. We prioritised interesting venues, nice food and colourful resources to create a buzz because we know that what people enjoy they remember and feel emotionally attached to.

We’d love to have the opportunity to bring the process to other complex local social and environmental challenges e.g. loneliness, homelessness, nature recovery or even water stewardship.

Get in touch to find out more: [email protected]