Raising our ambition on Net Zero — Place, Imagination and Collaboration
Net Zero is the agenda that keeps getting more important and seems — quite rightly — to be everywhere in policy development and the discourse about the major challenges and opportunities that face us today.
But beyond the flurry of new language about the issue, we seem now to be getting stuck in terms of how to actually bring this to life. Net Zero feels (wrongly) like a medium term challenge to many people and it is very easy for it to be pushed aside as people focus on the critical operational challenges facing much of our public sector. But this crowding out of the issue by (apparently) more urgent matters isn’t the real issue in terms of why we are not taking Net Zero forward rapidly enough.
My contention is that we are trying to address the challenge of Net Zero in ways that are far too limited in scope, lack imagination and are based on an organisational, not system, understanding of how change happens. This needs to change, and the way this will happen is for us to;
- Take a more radically ambitious Place based approach to delivering Net Zero,
- Reimagine the potential impact of our major public bodies, and;
- Develop a genuinely collaborative way of working.
I’d like to talk about each of these in turn.
First, the idea of Place as a way to deliver Net Zero.
At present we are trying to deal with the challenges of net zero as single organisations or parts of the public sector. For example, the NHS has a Net Zero target, the National Union of Farmers has a 2040 target, individual councils or businesses will have their own too etc etc. But this implicitly assumes that we will achieve progress by organisations or groups of organisations working on their own — which makes no sense. For example, it is unrealistic to expect a thirty year old District General Hospital or even a county level Integrated Care System to achieve Net Zero. Given the quality of most of the public estate, even with massive infrastructure development this isn’t going to happen. But what if we thought of the challenge of getting whole Places to Net Zero? What if there was a way to offset (sorry) the emissions associated with healthcare or some other activity with emissions reductions elsewhere in areas such as agriculture or land use choices (eg salt marsh restoration)?
If we think of the Net Zero challenge as one for whole Places, and not single organisations, then we may have a chance of doing something meaningful. Yes, there is a whole lot of accounting and governance that would need to be developed to make this work, but this is something we can do. And we have to, because the NHS in North Devon (where I live) is never going to get to Net Zero on its own. But Northern Devon as a place certainly could.
Second, I’d like to talk about reimagining the role of institutions.
And specifically, how we might think of the role of these major (usually public sector) institutions in delivering Net Zero. There has been much written on the idea and role of so-called Anchor Institutions and Net Zero gives us a chance to develop this even further. In my mind the challenge is to get our public bodies to become ambitious participants in the shaping of Places, not simply the deliverers of services. To do this those bodies need to widen their imagination in terms of their role, impact, and the resources they have available.
There are two great current examples of this — ‘open goals’ that the NHS and others like the Ministry of Defence and Police are walking past.
The first is their role as landowners. The MoD is the second largest landowner in the UK — but how is it using this asset to help deliver Net Zero? Its land use choices could help sequester carbon or even generate energy — but where are its plans to do so? Did you know what Warwickshire Constabulary owns some arable land? But is it using this to help deliver emissions reductions?
The second opportunity going begging is the role of the public sector estate as a jobs engine. At some stage very soon we need to prime the market and supply chain for retrofit in the built environment. But attempts to get started (Green Homes Grant etc) have been scuppered by a paper thin skills base and supply chain. We need to kick start this market and the best way to do it may be the public estate. This has a number of advantages. First the estate is big and it’s in poor condition — it provides a genuinely big market to drive skills development and job creation. Second the estate is everywhere — and often in places where there isn’t much else in terms of public bodies. So a rapid investment programme in the public estate will benefit all communities — a ready made ‘levelling up’ initiative if you like.
These two examples are pressing, but there are others. Most hospitals will be responsible for a significant proportion of all road journeys in a place, but this won’t feature in a description of the organisation or the impact they want to have. Local Plans are developed as mechanisms to deliver housing targets but there is no reason why they shouldn't also be a mechanism for support (or requiring?) emissions reduction, habitat restoration and the reduction of health inequalities?
As far as I can see, we aren’t doing any of the things above at the moment. Why not? Because we have a 50 year old view of the role of public bodies baked into the may those bodies work and set out their purpose and impact. This isn’t a problem of planning, it’s one of imagination.
Third, we need a way of working — and thinking — that is genuinely collaborative.
It is self-evident that unlocking some of the opportunities I’ve set out above requires collaboration. Yet much of the culture and processes of major public bodies actively mitigates against this. Some of it is mindset — for example when drawing up its recent plans on Net Zero the UK MoD based those plans on what emissions it thinks it needs to operate, rather than thinking what wider contribution it could also make. Planning departments in Local Authorities tend not to think of their role in creating long term health outcomes or entrenching health inequalities — but that’s often the result of much of the work that gets done on Spatial Planning or Local Plans. Simply, we operate in a way that ignores connection and dependence, and is almost wilfully blind to the way outcomes are created across or in different parts of a system. In order to address this, we need a public sector way of working that is much more collaborative from the outset. We need to see ourselves as real joint stakeholders in Places and see our public bodies as mechanisms to mobilise the resources needed to improve those places, not simply to look after the interests of individual organisations.
Perhaps this may be the biggest challenge — to collectively unlearn decades of incentives and training and cultural reinforcement that keeps us in our organisational boxes. But if we can’t escape them, Net Zero will never happen.
I’d like to finish on an upbeat note. The Net Zero agenda, if developed in the way I’ve set out here, is one of hope and change and transformative benefit to us all. It gives us the chance to radically reimagine much about our communities and the institutions that support them. It offers the chance to create thousands of jobs and genuinely improve quality of life.
But we won’t deliver these benefits by continuing to try and make the way we do things now just a little different and hope that by 2030/40/50 (take your pick) things will be better. They won’t. Now is the time to be radical — unless we change, nothing else will.
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If you would like to talk about anything I’ve written here, or work together on something, please get in touch using dcjrwork@gmail.com
