Community Leadership Panel case study

The Community Leadership Panel on Climate Change and Just Transition is a pioneering initiative to develop strategic community influence on important climate and nature planning and decision-making.

The panel bring diverse community insights and lived and learned experiences and can advocate for the priorities of Bristol communities. The panel complements other climate expert groups in the city such as the Bristol Advisory Committee on Climate Change, by bringing a climate justice lens to strategic thinking and planning around climate and nature.

The panel is a new model of community influence and leadership, developed by Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership with support from Praxis Research as part of the National Lottery funded Community Climate Action Project. It aims to help ensure diverse perspectives from Bristol’s communities, shape and inform important climate developments in Bristol and to positively influence city decision-making towards a just transition.

The types of initiatives that come to the panel are strategic and citywide (or regional), and at a timely point in their development so the panel can genuinely influence decisions and processes.

Why the panel was needed

The panel straddles the roles of being an expert panel and a community panel. Panellists provide expertise in how projects will affect different communities, and in identifying opportunities for communities to benefit. It is an advocacy panel for the needs of those who have less agency and whose needs are less visible to decision-makers. A holistic aim of the panel is to increase recognition of community knowledge and lived experience as a form of valuable expertise.

“The panel is made up of a knowledgeable, insightful group of people. It’s not often you’re lucky enough to get genuine feedback from a collective representing so much of our city in one room.” James Sterling, Communications and Engagement Manager, Bristol City Leap

The panellists draw their legitimacy from several sources:

• They have co-produced extensive community climate action plans with their communities, and therefore have knowledge and understanding of community social and climate priorities.
• They have learned experience of community concerns, through ongoing listening relationships in their communities.
• They may have lived experience of marginalised positions in their own lives.
• As a group of panellists, they bring a diversity of perspectives. We have recently recruited several new panellists to fill gaps in representation, and as the panel continues to develop further different perspectives will be included.

Meet the panel members

Replicating the panel

By sharing our journey and the lessons learned so far, we hope to support and inspire the creation of similar panels across the UK, fostering a broader movement towards a just and sustainable transition. We are continuing to develop and refine the panel model in Bristol and will be sharing more comprehensive insights in mid 2025.

Replicating the panel elsewhere with fewer resources may be challenging but possible with local adaptation. Therefore, rather than a blueprint, we’re sharing patterns that can be applied elsewhere, and adapted to the local context. Patterns for replication include:

• Provide a capacity building programme for panel members to deepen their knowledge and understanding of local strategy, governance and decision-making structures. Co-creating this programme with panellists allows for tailoring the content around their specific asks.
• Remunerate panel members adequately for their time. This is essential to ensure diverse voices are included. The panel aims to address underrepresentation of people with less surplus time to engage as active citizens and to elevate community expertise in city decision-making.
• Consider the potential sources of power, or ‘teeth’ for the panel. Is there any policy context which could push developers or policy makers to pay attention to community insights? In Bristol, the Just Transition Declaration endorsed by Bristol City Council creates a framework.
• Articulate reasons why decision makers will benefit from presenting to a panel, so they find their own reasons to value community expertise.
• Design sufficient safety for presenters to feel they can be honest, and be able to take in feedback rather than react defensively. This could be one of a number of tensions with the need for the panel to have ‘teeth’.
• Observe the current decision-making structures and advisory bodies in the local area, including government and non-government. Reach out to these and discuss the idea and need for a panel, and how it might fit in the existing patterns and interact with what is already there.
• Consider both communities of place and communities of shared experience. In Bristol, the panel began with partners in the Lottery funded Community Climate Action Project, which included four neighbourhood organisations, an organisation representing Bristol’s community of Disabled people and an organisation of asylum seekers and refugees.
• Champion the panel. To create such a structure, someone needs to believe in it enough to gather support and resources and bring it into being.
• Find a ‘home’ for a secretariat in the longer term. Someone needs to take on the administrative responsibility of running the panel. This work includes advocacy of the panel with key local stakeholders, active marketing of panel sessions, managing expressions of interest, liaising with panellists and presenters, convening and hosting panel sessions, compiling recommendations report, follow up with presenters, recruitment and capacity building of panellists. This is ongoing work which needs to be resourced.
• The panel will be most likely to succeed if it has a home in an established organisation that ideally is independent of the local authority. Independence enables panellists to remain impartial when local authority items come to the panel, and be perceived as not ‘the council’, although it has to maintain a constructive relationship with the local council.
• Keep learning. Each of the pilot panel sessions has brought unexpected learnings – about the protocols we use, about the way community expertise is perceived, about the assumptions made by different organisations.
• Think about legitimacy. Who are the panel members? Do they have lived experiences of the issues they are representing? The panel’s legitimacy does not have to rest solely on direct lived experience of panellists, but there must be some. Who are the key communities in your locality which need to be represented for the panel to have legitimacy? Do they have interest in and knowledge of climate justice? What capacity building is needed to develop climate knowledge among communities which are traditionally underrepresented in climate action? Some of the most appropriate panel members will have healthy concerns over how representative they are, so ensure panellists’ lived and learned experience is acknowledged and they can feel confident to represent their communities.

This case study was based on a report by Praxis Research. We’ll be developing further resources and sharing more learnings from the project as a whole over the coming year so make sure you’re signed up to hear from us, and in the meantime check out our resource library.

Find out more about the Community Climate Action Project