Towards More Participatory Net Zero Futures (NZF) · Centre for Environment and Sustainability
A practitioner-researcher's journey through the gap between governance innovation ambition and the messy, under-resourced, people-dependent realities of cities trying to reach net zero.
Nearly four years of research — with an extensive research stay embedded in the EU NetZeroCities Mission Platform, working alongside Bristol City Council, community organisations, urban planning and finance specialists, closely following dozens of UK and EU 'Trailblazer' cities, and reviewing digital resources across more platforms than I can count — I kept encountering the same tension. The governance tools being developed for cities tackling the net zero transition were genuinely innovative: more participatory, more reflexive, more ambitious than anything that came before. And yet, the people trying to use them kept hitting the same walls.
The frameworks are proliferating faster than cities can meaningfully integrate them — many too conceptual to operationalise, others genuinely useful but resource-intensive to learn and embed. Co-benefits are named in strategies but rarely measured. Community engagement is called for in guidance but often not adequately resourced. The 'radical collaboration' that the mission approach aspires to keeps colliding with austerity, risk aversion, and the collective action challenges of large-scale transformation.
"Behind every tool are 'anchor people' trying to make it work — each carrying distinct perspectives, from institutional mandates and investor criteria to resident needs."
This series draws on that empirical work to offer something more than a critique. It maps what the tools are designed to do, where they fall short, and — crucially — what it actually takes to make them work in practice. Across Bristol, fellow Mission cities, and UK pathfinder places, the same finding kept surfacing: the gap between governance ambition and practice is not primarily technical. It's down to the long-term, complex 'people work' of more participatory, inclusive net zero futures: relational, institutional, and political.
The series
Each brief stands on its own but builds on the one before. Together they move from conceptual tools, to data analysis, to Bristol's toolkit, to lived practitioner experience, to a final critical reckoning with the mission approach itself.
Brief 1 · 21 May 2026
Contemporary Urban Governance Innovation Design: Principles, Tools, and an Innovation Typology
Introduces the REPAIR framework — six governance innovation design principles synthesised from 25 Procedural Governance Tools — and the Innovation Diamond typology. The foundational conceptual toolkit for the whole series.
Supplements the peer-reviewed article Cities and governance for net-zero in Sustainability (2025) — doi.org/10.3390/su17062698
Brief 2 · 26 May 2026
Valuing What Matters in Urban Climate Governance: Co-Benefits Gaps and Functions in Making the Case for Action
Traces a four-stage 'co-benefits cascade' — from what frameworks propose to what is actually measured — across Mission Label cities, from a close examination of the 10 in Cohort 1, to wider patterns mirrored in the 92 in Cohorts 1–4, to the overarching urban climate governance data system. Introduces the Four Functions Model for how cities use co-benefits in practice.
Supplements the article Making the Case for Climate Action in Cities in Urban Governance (2026) — doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2026.05.002
Brief 3 · 28 May 2026
Governing a Just Net Zero Transition: The Bristol Toolkit and City and Community Visions for Change
Maps a sample of Bristol's cross-sector decision-support toolkit — the Four-Lens Model, the Tripod Approach, Community Climate Action Plans — and asks: are city and community visions for change converging, or running in parallel?
Brief 4 · 1 June 2026
Governing Net Zero Missions: Innovation, Alignment, and Mobilisation Insights from Bristol and Fellow Cities
Draws on 16 stakeholder interviews across Bristol's public, knowledge/advisory, and VCSE sectors to examine the 'people work' of mission governance — why alignment across competing institutional logics and 'languages' is so hard, and what actually makes it possible.
Brief 5 · 3 June 2026
Missions, Myths, and Contemporary Procedural Governance Tools: Reflections and a Proposed Research Agenda
A critical synthesis. Applies the 3Ms — Myths, Mechanisms, and Productive Margins — to evaluate what EU Cities Mission and UK Net Zero Living programme approaches have achieved, where assumptions don't hold, and what a future research and governance design agenda must address.
What I found
The starting point for this research was a simple but persistently common observation: cities across Europe and the UK are taking bold strides towards genuinely innovative governance approaches — participatory planning, cross-sector Transition Teams, reflexive monitoring systems, community co-production — and yet the gap between what these tools are designed to do and current operational capacities and capabilities on the ground remains stubbornly wide.
Part of the problem is structural. Governance tools proliferate through transnational networks faster than the infrastructure to integrate them. Cities face a crowded, overlapping landscape of frameworks without a shared meta-framework for aligning them. The competitive, project-based funding environment incentivises creating new tools over the harder work of building coherence. And carbon metrics dominate monitoring systems because they are required and standardised, while the co-benefits most critical for a just transition remain aspirational.
Of 712 co-benefits identified across ten Mission cities' action plans, only 41% aligned with the NetZeroCities indicator framework. Across five leading cities tracked in the CDP reporting system, social, equity, health, and governance co-benefits were not measured as impact indicators at all. The endpoint of the cascade: only emissions reductions and energy savings get consistently tracked.
But the deeper problem is relational. What became clearest through immersion in the Bristol case — and confirmed through comparative work across fellow Mission cities and UK Net Zero Living places — is that the 'people work' of governance innovation is chronically invisible in the tools designed to support it. Building trust across sectors, aligning institutions, sustaining participatory processes, translating between community knowledge and institutional logic: all of this is treated as an absorbed cost rather than a core governance investment.
Bristol's enabling ecosystem — a neutral broker network, embedded research and advocacy capacity, a thriving VCSE sector, core funding accumulated over decades — took 20–30 years to build. Of the 31 Mission Label cities whose journeys I analysed, 28 had been engaged in climate action for nine years or more before joining the Mission. Mission-readiness is not something a top-down programme produces. It's something cities bring to it.
The conceptual contribution
The series introduces several frameworks developed to help make sense of these dynamics — and to give practitioners, policymakers, and researchers something to work with.
Brief 1
The REPAIR framework synthesises six governance innovation design principles — Reflexivity, Enabling/Embedding, Participatory, Adaptivity, Integrative, Radicality — as both a diagnostic and a design lens for evaluating where governance innovations are strong and where investment is most needed.
Brief 1
The Innovation Diamond maps four enabling innovation domains — governance, social, financial, and learning — and argues that learning innovation is the connective thread: without it, the other three pull in different directions and create fragmentation rather than coherent enabling conditions.
Brief 2
The Four Functions Model identifies how cities actually use co-benefits in governance: as compliance, as economies of scale, as theories of change, and as advocacy and communications — with very different governance risks and transformational gains attached to each.
Brief 5
The Governance Innovation Tripod frames learning innovation as the stabilising prong that holds governance, social, and financial innovation together — and applies the REPAIR lens to what 'strategic learning' actually requires across six dimensions that cities must build capacity for in sequence, not simultaneously.
These frameworks don't resolve the tensions at the heart of net zero governance. But they make them more legible — and more addressable. The three competing institutional logics that mission governance must reconcile (governance/compliance, financial/technical, and community/legitimacy) aren't going away. What changes is whether they are acknowledged and actively managed, or papered over with 'win-win' narratives that eventually expose cities to the legitimacy risks they were designed to prevent.
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A canvas for mapping your enabling ecosystem — grounded in the NZF research series. Each innovation domain and reflective prompt draws on the evidence and frameworks developed across the five briefs. The colour-coded brief references below show where each domain is primarily rooted.
Who is already engaged, and on whose terms? Whose voices and expertise are structurally excluded — and what would it take to move from consultation to genuine co-production?
Reflexive considerations: The briefs consistently distinguish tokenistic engagement from trust-based, asset-building co-production that gives community knowledge real influence. The harder question is not just who attends but whether their input shapes outcomes — and whether your engagement model is building shared ownership or reproducing extractive dynamics over time.
What are you actually measuring — and does it capture what matters for a just transition? How is learning flowing between community, city, and regional levels, or is each system learning within its own boundaries?
Reflexive considerations: There is often a significant gap between what is named, what is indicated, and what is actually measured. Genuine reflexivity means asking not just "are we on track?" but "on track toward what, and for whom?" — and ensuring that learning at community level actively informs planning at city and regional level, rather than sitting alongside it.
What is your city's net zero journey so far, and what are the key requirements and constraints shaping it? What informal forums, networks, or spaces already bring sectors together — and where are the gaps that need to be created?
Reflexive considerations: Start with context before jumping to structures. Understanding where your city is on its journey shapes what is realistic next. Once you have a sense of the landscape, look for the connective tissue: the people working across organisations, the neutral spaces where different sectors meet. These anchor people and local champions are often the best starting point for deepening mutual understanding and beginning to connect the dots.
What resources — funding, assets, skills, relationships, data — already exist locally, and how are they being mobilised? Where are community priorities not yet connecting to investment or delivery, and what would help bridge that gap?
Reflexive considerations: Resources should be understood broadly: community assets, volunteer capacity, local data, trusted relationships, and in-kind contributions are all part of the picture. The gap between a community action plan and an investable proposition is real and often requires specialist support and multiple funding cycles to close — building shared understanding of what change looks like, and for whom, is often the missing piece that makes everything else more coherent.
Enabling Ecosystem — the relational 'people work' and 'impact infrastructure' that hold the innovation domains together. Anchor people, brokers, and a neutral space are often the starting point: who convenes across sectors? Where is the trusted, non-issue-specific space that can hold relationships over time? NZF-B4 NZF-B5
Who this is for
For city officers and practitioners working in Mission or 'Mission-minded' cities, Net Zero Living places, or UK local authority climate roles: the briefs offer diagnostic frameworks, comparative insights, and honest assessments of what the tools being used are designed to do versus what they can actually deliver with current resourcing.
For policymakers and funders — including the EU Commission, Innovate UK, national governments, and philanthropic funders: the series makes the structural argument for treating governance innovation as a core investment, not an absorbed overhead. It identifies the single enabling condition that all five briefs point to: a (UK) statutory local authority climate duty (or EU member country/international equivalent), with resources to match.
For researchers: the series offers a research agenda grounded in empirical gaps — governance process indicators, regional-scale scaling mechanisms, the operationalisation of co-benefits functions — that the existing literature has not yet adequately addressed.
"Do not let perfect be the enemy of the good — but do not mistake first steps for the destination. The task now is sustained, joined-up investment across governance, social, financial, and learning innovation. The journey cannot be skipped; but it has demonstrably advanced."
The productive margins are real. Trust-based city–civil society partnerships are deepening. Co-benefits approaches are becoming more integrated into planning. Cross-sector networks are strengthening. These are critical footholds — and they deserve to be recognised, resourced, and connected, rather than allowed to dissolve when project funding ends.
The Net Zero Futures (NZF) study (2022–2026) examined how cities can effectively mobilise resources to implement inclusive, participatory net zero strategies aligned with SDG goals. Phase 1 mapped 25 governance tools across UK, EU, and global contexts. Phase 2 involved six months embedded within the NetZeroCities Mission Platform, followed by a case study of Bristol's Net Zero Investment Co-Innovation Lab, drawing on 16 interviews with 18 experts across three stakeholder clusters. 24 expert informational interviews with 22 experts were conducted across the study.
The research was made possible by a University of Surrey–Centre for Environment and Sustainability doctoral scholarship and Turing Scheme mobility funding support. Many thanks to the Lund University International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, ICLEI Europe, and De Montfort University Institute for Sustainable Futures research groups for hosting parts of the research, and to all the experts that engaged as a part of the study.
Joel Terwilliger is an impact and engagement professional and action-practitioner researcher working at the intersection of urban climate governance, just transition, and participatory innovation. He brings over a decade of experience leading stakeholder engagement, communications, and partnership development across higher education and the non-profit sector internationally — alongside nearly four years of doctoral research in UK and EU climate policy contexts.
His doctoral research, Towards More Participatory Net Zero Futures (University of Surrey, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Ian Christie, Prof. Subhes Bhattacharyya, and Prof. Stelvia Matos), was developed through direct engagement with the NetZeroCities EU Cities Mission consortium, Bristol City Council's Net Zero Investment Co-Innovation Lab, and Innovate UK's Net Zero Living programme. As a Visiting Researcher at ICLEI Europe (Freiburg, 2024), he contributed to the Climate City Contracts and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning work packages — including a co-benefits gap analysis that informed the first CCC annual trends report, and the 'CCC Highlights' series, which was adopted and scaled as a core consortium output.
Before his doctoral research, Joel led alumni relations and engagement strategy at the University of Auckland (200,000+ alumni across Asia Pacific, Europe, and the US), Newcastle University Business School, and the University of Technology Sydney. He has built international networks, designed large-scale engagement programmes aligned to the UN SDGs, and translated complex research and policy for non-specialist audiences. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, De Montfort University.
His peer-reviewed article on governance innovation design is published in Sustainability (2025, 17(6), p. 2698): doi.org/10.3390/su17062698. His second article, on co-benefits and monitoring systems in urban governance, is published in Urban Governance (2026): doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2026.05.002.
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