The Strategy Room rollout
www.nesta.org.uk/project-updates/the-strategy-room-rollout/
www.nesta.org.uk/project-updates/the-strategy-room-rollout/
Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design has been working on scaling up public engagement in local net-zero policymaking through The Strategy Room.
The Strategy Room is an immersive experience that uses facilitated deliberation, interactive polling, and collective intelligence to identify the climate change policies that will best help each local area reach net-zero emissions.
It’s a simple and cost-effective way for local authorities to engage their citizens, understand their views on energy, transport and food policies, and use the data to guide local climate decision-making.
Following an award-winning pilot in 2023, the project entered its rollout phase, supported by a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation. The grant provided funding for local councils to host Strategy Room sessions, enabling them to engage with their citizens.
Over the one-year rollout, eight local authorities across England all used the Strategy Room to engage their residents: Halton, Suffolk Climate Change Partnership (covering five local authorities in Suffolk), Cheshire West and Chester, Calderdale, Canterbury, Bracknell Forest, Camden, and Barnet.
We ran a total of 50 sessions, engaging 395 participants in the deliberative discussions and making the data publicly available on the Strategy Room website.
This means Strategy Room has now been used by 19 local authorities and over 1,000 people across the country have taken part to express their views on net zero since it was launched in January 2023.
The Strategy Room enabled local authorities to engage residents in meaningful conversations about climate change, particularly reaching those often excluded from such discussions. Halton Council, for example, described how the initiative enabled them to conduct “well-structured, meaningful dialogues” and gather data for benchmarking against other authorities.
Camden similarly used the Strategy Room to connect with individuals previously uninvolved in climate conversations as part of developing their new 2030 Climate Action Plan. Across the councils, there was a consistent emphasis on how the Strategy Room broadened participation and deepened understanding of public attitudes toward climate action.
Councils also outlined specific and practical ways they plan to use the data gathered. For example, in Halton, insights are being used to test and refine policies that require community support to succeed, such as electric vehicle adoption and home insulation, and to build long-term engagement strategies. Suffolk used the findings to identify barriers to net-zero measures and launched initiatives like social media campaigns and community events to tackle common misconceptions, especially around electric vehicles.
Canterbury will use the data to shape its updated climate strategy ahead of a second public consultation in 2025, with a focus on green mobility and retrofitting. Barnet is applying the data to understand what prevents residents from making their homes more energy efficient and to design relevant interventions for their ‘Sustainable Homes’ programme. Bracknell Forest sees the Strategy Room as central to resource prioritisation and inspiring local climate action, and will use their newfound understanding to shape climate community strategies.
More than half of the participants in each council supported the climate policies explored in the Strategy Room, showing that public support remains strong. However, this percentage was considerably lower than the pilot, where more than 80% of participants backed every policy. This might be because some people are unsure whether their council can deliver these changes, a theme that came up recurrently during the deliberations.
Even with these differences, the same four policies were most popular in both the pilot and the rollout:
This shows that some climate actions are widely supported, independently of where people live.
We also saw more mixed opinions on three ideas: rating supermarkets on their environmental impact, offering public transport subscription services, and creating shared electric vehicle car clubs. These are the policies where local context seems to play the most significant role.
Finally, just like in the pilot, people placed high importance on the extra benefits of climate action. More than 90% said that better health and stronger communities were the most valuable outcomes. You can view and download all of the data on strategyroom.uk
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