Finding the anchor points for steering Bristol’s just transition

Joel Terwilliger, a climate and energy governance specialist with the Surrey Centre for Environment and Sustainability, shares insights from his Towards More Participatory Net Zero Futures (NZF) doctoral research. The NZF project was a four-year exploration of mission-oriented governance and the conditions needed to support a just transition in Bristol and beyond.

Net zero has become increasingly polarised — caught between ambitions for a clean energy mission and concerns over rising living costs. At the same time, concepts like missions and net zero can feel too abstract to resonate at the doorstep or dinner table. What people care about most — their neighbourhoods, quality of life, housing, transport, and energy bills — is not a side issue in the transition. It is where the transition must begin.

This also helps explain why progress is often difficult to sustain. Many households do not have the luxury of prioritising climate concerns when faced with immediate economic pressures. Organisations, meanwhile, are often focused on maintaining core services and operations over co-investing in shared priorities with others. These are not moral failings; they are the predictable consequences of systems that tend to reward competition more readily than collaboration. If a just transition is ultimately about creating a different kind of future, it raises a fundamental question: what kind of society do we want to build, and how do we get there together?

Why Bristol needs a new kind of social contract

That question sits behind governance innovations such as the Climate City Contract, developed in Sweden and scaled across 112 cities like Bristol in the EU Cities Mission. The aim is to make net zero planning more participatory, inclusive, and responsive to local priorities. In effect, it represents a new form of social contract: one that enables people to engage with climate action and have meaningful influence over decisions.

This matters because city councils directly control only a small share of local emissions (just 0.5% in Bristol). The wider transition depends on residents, businesses, investors, and institutions acting together, making the city’s role one of convening, legitimising, and enabling collective action. Bristol has spent nearly two decades building the foundations for this approach. While still evolving, these foundations offer important anchor points for a just transition.

Strength one: a strong ecosystem of research and community leadership

One of Bristol’s greatest strengths is its ecosystem of research, civic leadership, and community organisations. The city has drawn extensively on UK and European support networks while benefiting from a strong voluntary, community and social enterprise sector. Organisations including the Centre for Sustainable Energy, Bristol Energy Network, and Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership have been embedded across successive projects, bridging the technical with community-facing. The Partnership, in particular, has played an important role as both convener and trusted intermediary, helping maintain relationships and momentum across sectors.

Strength two: leading with co-benefits, not carbon alone

A second strength lies in leading with co-benefits rather than carbon alone. Across Bristol and other Mission cities, successful engagement often begins with the issues people already care about: affordable energy, housing quality, transport, green space, food, wellbeing, and community resilience. Through this approach, community anchor organisations have co-produced local climate action plans that build on existing strengths and surface locally defined priorities.

The city’s creative sector has also helped make engagement more relevant, accessible, and grounded in place. The challenge, however, is that many of the co-benefits most important to a just transition — social cohesion, agency, mental health, and resilience — remain difficult to value within conventional investment and decision-making frameworks. See NZF Briefs 2 and 3 for more detail.

Where the tensions lie

At the same time, important tensions remain. Across Bristol and fellow Mission cities, three institutional perspectives frequently coexist.

• Public-sector actors must navigate compliance requirements and financial constraints.
• Finance and advisory specialists are focused on creating scalable propositions capable of attracting capital to meet the vast climate finance gap (~£7.8 billion for Bristol alone).
• Community organisations prioritise legitimacy, ownership, and trust at neighbourhood level.

Each perspective is valid, but each defines success differently and carbon and economic metrics remain dominant. Bridging them requires confronting trade-offs openly rather than glossing over differences.

Bridging the gaps: early mechanisms taking shape

Encouragingly, Bristol has begun developing mechanisms that connect these perspectives. Community-led plans identify local priorities, city-wide roadmaps help coordinate action, and emerging regional investment initiatives are starting to link local ambitions with wider funding opportunities. Together, these efforts are helping generate practical models that advance thinking about place-based, just transition innovation in the UK and beyond. See NZF Briefs 1 & 3 for background.

This is where what I describe as the ‘productive margins’ become especially important: spaces within existing institutional constraints where experimentation, trust-building, and collaboration are beginning to take hold. These margins often depend on resources that remain undervalued in conventional approaches to investment and governance, including community assets, local knowledge, trusted relationships, volunteer capacity, and in-kind contributions.

Yet these are often the foundations that hold collaborative efforts together. Supporting and resourcing them is some of the most important — and least visible — work in place-based innovation. Getting creative about what counts as a resource is often a place to start in the short term, but goodwill alone is insufficient in the long term. See NZF Brief 4 for more detail.

What’s needed next

What is needed now is greater clarity around roles, responsibilities, and the supporting ‘impact infrastructure’ that enables collaboration to become the rational choice rather than the costly one. Decision-making processes and definitions of success need to be transparent and democratically shaped. Equally important is honest conversation about how risks, costs, and benefits are distributed across society and how inequalities can be mitigated rather than reinforced.

Locally, this means recognising civil society not as an optional add-on, but as a core part of the social infrastructure that enables collective action. Regionally and nationally, it points towards policy and funding arrangements that reward alignment and treat community-led innovation as a valuable source of evidence about what works in practice. See NZF Brief 5 for future directions.

The Bristol Just Transition Compass

Drawing on the NZF research, I developed the Bristol Just Transition Compass (below) as one interpretation of the foundations already emerging across the city and as an invitation to continue the conversation. The Compass highlights enabling conditions that can help actors navigate complexity, identify opportunities for collaboration, and strengthen the foundations of a just transition. It also reinforces the importance of trusted intermediaries capable of holding differences in values, priorities, and power long enough for genuinely shared solutions to emerge.

Building on these foundations will not be quick or linear. Trust, shared ways of working, and collective learning take years to develop and cannot be delivered through short project cycles alone. They require sustained investment in the relationships and institutional capacity that underpin meaningful collaboration. Much of this work remains invisible in the project outputs and strategies it makes possible, but Bristol’s experience demonstrates that ‘first next steps’ to progress are achievable when these foundations are recognised and supported.

The Compass is intended both as a resource for Bristol’s ongoing transition journey and as a starting point for other places seeking to map their own enabling conditions, identify productive margins, and chart their own just transition pathways. Onward and upward!

Download the full NZF research series and Just Transition Compass Guidebook