Dr Daniel Slade on how the Royal Town Planning Institute is taking a new approach to its research on strategic planning for climate resilience
It’s a disconcerting experience, but one I’m sure I share with many in our sector who work on climate change; I swing wildly between pessimism and optimism about our sector’s response to the challenge on an almost daily basis.
First, there’s the good days. The sun shines, and I remember that we have surprisingly powerful environmental law at our disposal. Decentralisation is beginning to enable mayors and combined authorities to experiment with low-carbon urban policy in ways which national governments cannot, and Wales and Scotland are showing England what’s possible with drive and long-term thinking. Perhaps most reassuringly, I find myself working every day with people and institutions across the sector that care deeply about the subject.
Then there are the bad days. On the bad days, the mind-boggling enormity of the challenge hits home. National policy feels like it’s regressing and becoming less, rather than more, certain. Siloed government departments continue to pump out myopic, technology-led strategies. And perhaps most depressingly, years of austerity have left some LPAs’ resourcing in such a state that they cannot afford to send their staff to free training sessions on climate change, let alone give the subject the level of attention which they are legally obliged to do so.
Luckily, we have the luxury of not having to choose between these two perspectives. Climate change is happening and the imperative is to act. The trick, therefore, for research organisations and professional bodies like ourselves is to directly confront the negatives, while carefully identifying opportunities to build on the positives. Providing best practice without confronting the local public sector’s serious resourcing challenges won’t get us anywhere.
This is the balancing act that underpins our work to produce guidance on strategic planning for climate resilience, and we realised that it would require us to take a whole new approach to our research process.
Targeting strategic planning for climate change
Our first decision was to focus our work on planning for climate resilience at the strategic, rather than local, level. As others have argued, while many LPAs’ ability to effectively develop climate change policy is deeply constrained by their resourcing and national policy, the emerging landscape of strategic planning in the UK has real potential, with combined authorities (CAs) in particular representing a huge opportunity.
With the exception of Greater Manchester, most CAs’ institutional structures are fluid and still emerging. This is challenging, but it also means that there’s real opportunity to experiment and cement best practice before their institutional forms and working practices crystallise. CAs are also flexible in that they’re relatively free to pursue their mayor’s policy agendas, beyond the dual national policy imperatives – housebuilding and economic growth – that so often consume LPAs’ own policy agendas and limited resourcing.
And, while there is clearly no alternative for sufficiently resourced local planning authorities, CAs are in a strong position to raise standards across their constituent authorities, whether through the ‘soft’ power of political leadership or through firmer means, such as Spatial Development Strategies (SDS). These are statutory plans which constituent local planning authorities must consider when producing their local plans. So far, outside London only three combined authorities have the power to make SDSs, but there is real potential to roll these powers out more widely.
Overall, and in blunt terms, targeting this strategic level ‘hotwires’ climate change policymaking over large areas, helping to raise standards while bypassing, to an extent, local capacity shortages.
Action research as a way of building capacity and generating certainty
While they may be well placed to pursue strong climate change agendas, CAs’ resourcing pressures can be as acute as those faced by LPAs. Liverpool City Region CA, for example, has two full-time planners working on their SDS. Greater Manchester, despite its size and status, has only a handful. Given this, a traditional ‘arms-length’ approach to best practice research – producing findings and then casting it out to the policy community – are not particularly effective. What is needed is to actively build capacity in planning for climate resilience during the research process, and be directly involved in policymaking when needed.
To these ends, we settled on an “action research” approach, in which an RTPI officer would be embedded in a CA and work directly on policymaking. As well as capacity building, our shared experience of the policy process will then directly inform the contents of the guide itself and ensure that it responds to the issues planners face on the ground when grappling with climate resilience.
Policy successfully developed in the field will then feed back into our guidance on strategic planning for climate resilience, bringing with it a reassurance that it has been successfully deployed and undergone thorough examination. This may help to addressing the uncertainty which currently dogs many CAs and LPAs in their attempts to adopt best practice policy and standards, especially on the subject of viability.
Liverpool City Region
Liverpool City Region was the obvious CA to work with in this project. First, the timing is right; in the pipeline of CAs with the power to produce SDSs, they are likely to be the first to do so. Getting their strategy right is therefore crucial not only for the city region’s 1.6m people, but for the whole project of decentralisation. We want metro mayors to see the benefits, rather than risks, of bold strategic planning for climate change and other issues, and lobby for the devolution of further powers.
Second, the University of Liverpool is home to a world-class, RTPI-accredited planning school, with expertise in environmental planning. We strategically commissioned the school to develop a portfolio of best practice strategic planning for climate resilience case studies with the intention that, by purposefully drawing on local expertise in this way, we could strengthen Merseyside’s urban climate resilience policy network, and in particular ensure cross-pollination between planning academia and practice.
Thirdly and finally, there was a meeting of minds on the need for socially conscious approach to resilience planning. Indeed, the concept of ‘climate justice’ is central to our work, while equity and fairness were key pillars of LCR metro mayor Steve Rotheram’s manifesto. These concepts have influenced his thinking on planning for climate change, as he outlined in this recent article.
Now is the time to take risks
By taking an action-orientated approach to this project, we hope to develop policymaking capacity on climate resilience in Liverpool, while also building certainty and ensuring the guidance we produce is as valuable as possible for planners across England.
This is certainly an experiment, and being involved with ‘live’ policy brings with it a range of risks. But the scale of the climate challenge means that we need to break old boundaries if our sector is going to play its part it in driving the massive social, technological and economic changes required.
There is an ethical imperative on all of us in the built environment to begin taking risks, find new ways to work, and push the envelope.
Research Officer
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