Case studies

Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC): Low Carbon Communities Challenge

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The Brief

'The Big Energy Shift', a public dialogue research project, revealed that support in the community could be a good way to helping individual households cut their energy consumption and carbon emissions. 2010 saw the launch of the Low Carbon Communities Challenge (LCCC), a two-year project aiming to pioneer and test ways to cut carbon emissions at the community level. Energy saving and production technologies such as solar panels and air source heat pumps were to be trialled, along with new techniques to address wider sustainability issues in local transport, education and food production.

As a part of the evaluation of this exciting and original project, Dialogue by Design was contracted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to lead a programme of 'co-inquiry and public dialogue', which involved providing expert engagement support to each of the communities and transferring learning among communities and policy makers by organising a programme of national workshops.

The Process

Dialogue by Design devised and managed a comprehensive programme of engagement training, events and review for the 22 LCCC projects. Our decentralised team of facilitators, with a great deal of local knowledge, perfectly suited the geographically diverse nature of this project and each participating community worked with their own facilitator. Trust and understanding rapidly built up between the community groups and facilitators.

The project followed several steps:

• The LCCC launch event organised and facilitated by DbyD took place in February 2010. Members of all 22 projects attended providing an excellent opportunity for inception meetings and allowing project participants to understand who to contact for support and expert advice.
• The facilitators helped the LCCC projects organise their engagement with the wider community through a bespoke engagement plan created at the beginning of the project.
• Support was given to the LCCC projects throughout in the form of facilitated workshops and review meetings.
• A year on from the start of the project the low carbon communities were able to share their experience in a networking event. DbyD also organised and facilitated four thematic policy workshops to share learning with DECC policy leads.

The Outcome

Despite the diverse nature of the community groups involved in the LCCC the engagement programme identified a number of overall lessons to be learned from the LCCC pilot scheme. Our report outlined the importance of building trust with communities, and strategies for effective partnership with others. Furthermore the project was able to identify the potential of Feed-In Tariffs to support the long-term financial sustainability of LCCC schemes. Important lessons were also learned in dealing with very different types of communities with varying needs and aspirations.

In addition to the learning outcomes of this project, the policy workshop event enabled the findings from the 22 projects' engagement strategies to feed directly into Department of Energy and Climate Change policy. This has helped DECC to develop further programmes including the Green Deal and the Renewable Heat Incentive.