Benefits of community-driven climate action
Building of local equity through distributed leadership and benefits received from solution implementation.
Prioritization of local ownership of solutions (this is directly related to building local equity, as ownership often results in significant benefits).
Solutions that multi-solve intersecting challenges; this is most likely to occur if a truly diverse section of the community is involved in planning and implementation, as the different perspectives draw attention to intersecting challenges and opportunities.
Access any step:
Plans and implementation that truly reflect local priorities and meet local needs.
Community leadership, understanding, and engagement are consistently cultivated and strengthened.
Capacity is built by continuously supporting the involvement of many, rather than leaving planning and action on the shoulders of a few. This can also lead to increased identification of opportunities to collaborate with existing initiatives which also leads to increased capacity.
Challenges in community-driven climate action
Like any highly participatory process, community-driven climate action can be nuanced and challenging. The approach requires thoughtful planning, intent, and facilitation, as well as a high degree of responsiveness and flexibility. Sometimes, it might feel like this approach is slowing things down, a feeling that is challenging alongside the urgency that exists to address climate change. This feeling of slow progress is especially common in the early stages of planning an initiative or new project. However, as the examples in this toolkit demonstrate, the highly participatory process of community-driven climate action ensures accelerated and heightened impact in the long run through building capacity, increased community support, and long-term sustainability. It is important to recognize the difference between slowing down to ensure participation in true community-driven process and slowing down to try to avoid all conflict or obtain full support. The process of feeling out the difference is often somewhat intuitive and best held collectively. We have found communication between facilitators of different community-driven initiatives to be a very helpful tool through which we can support each other on questions, such as when it is important to slow down and when it is necessary to accelerate the process.
What is community-driven climate action?
Community-driven climate action is defined as climate action that is both developed and implemented with a high degree of meaningful community participation and, ideally, leadership. Meaningful participation is understood to be participation in which the ideas, priorities, perspectives, experiences and concerns of participants are actively heard, valued highly, and significantly shape each phase of the process.
Within the community-driven approach, the community is understood to be the leader in defining plans and the process of implementation and those who might typically be seen as the leader (directors or initiators of the projects) are understood to be facilitators of the community-driven approach. These facilitators have two simultaneous and intersecting priorities: to support meaningful community participation and leadership and to bring the necessary tools, knowledge, and other resources to the table to effectively support shepherding plans into impactful action with measurable results (and it is very important that those results are shared with the community and collectively digested and utilized in future planning and implementation processes).
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.