Dumfries & Galloway Citizens Panel on Climate Change
Enabling broad, inclusive participation, and consensus, around the UK's most ambitious regional net zero strategy.In 2019, Dumfries and Galloway became the first council in the UK to declare a Climate Emergency, committing to regional net zero by 2025 and a “radical and comprehensive step change” in how it worked.
CCN won the tender to design, recruit and facilitate a Citizens Panel on Climate Change: a regional process that would enable the meaningful participation of the citizenry in shaping the Carbon Neutral Strategic Plan, and in helping turn the ambition into reality. The full report can be downloaded here.
A goal, agreed at the outset, was that the output would not simply be a report, but would support the implementation and evaluation of strategic actions arising from the Panel’s recommendations – a shared commitment with the Council to tangible change on the ground rather than “one more consultation”.
Between 2021-23, we assembled a panel of around 100 citizens and 70 young people from five very different communities – Dumfries, Stranraer, Langholm, Kirkconnel & Kelloholm, and Dalry. A core aim was a genuinely place-representative group in each location, with a strong emphasis on seldom-heard voices.
The Panel mapped what mattered most in, and between, their communities, and identifying common priorities for change. In dialogue with around 50 expert witnesses, including council officers, academics, national agencies and NGO leads – they co-developed and consensually agreed a 10-point grounded Regional Model for net-zero transition.
The Regional Plan was further composed of six Priority Themes: Enabling Partnership-Working (of overarching importance); Building Community Self-Sufficiency; Retaining Young People; Flooding; Optimal Land Use and Management; and Effective Green Transport Infrastructure.
These broke down into a system of 22 interrelated sub-priorities that set out what the Council’s net-zero strategy could look like in pragmatic “on-the-ground” terms. The process also modelled an innovative methodology for working in genuine partnership between a region’s citizenry, council officers and national experts.
The consensual outputs provided a citizen-led lens and basis for a range of recommendations in regard the Council’s draft Carbon Neutral Strategic Plan. These highlighted where existing actions were already strongly aligned, where they needed reframing, and where key strategic actions and commitments (for example around education, youth participation and flood-risk partnership-working) were missing.
Other impacts included crystallising a problematic gap between lived experience of place and abstract organisational systems. It also demonstrated how structured dialogue and partnership-working could bridge this, restoring public trust, and reducing scepticism and apathy in regard to engagement. Young panellists – including primary and secondary schoolchildren – were recognised as finalists in the Dumfries and Galloway Youth Awards 2022 for their sophisticated shaping of priorities around (particularly) environmental restoration, education, capacity-building, public transport and waste.
The work of the Citizens Panel has now been incorporated across the Council strategy and departments, and the recommendations on partnership-working have reinforced thinking and approaches regarding how the Council and communities collaborate in climate action over time.
Can I just say that on first read through the report is an impressive piece of work. The element focussing on farming is particularly interesting and hasn’t yet been examined (to my mind) in the context in which you have placed it from the farmer’s point of view in a rural community.
The Report is well done and as far as the topics I talked to, and listened to others, the content — discussion and conclusions — accord with my understandings and recollections. When will we know when we are permitted to share this vital material?
The Citizens Panel process ensured inclusive participation, constructive dialogue and access to expert evidence, demonstrating the value of collaborative engagement between communities, experts and officers. The findings have been incorporated into the Council’s Carbon Neutral Strategic Plan and will continue to inform future activity, providing a replicable model for community engagement on complex issues.
That session resonated so much with our research into older adults’ experiences of living in communities in D&G – the story of a rural transport system that fails people every day was very much common thread we found in that work. It is always interesting to see how others facilitate sessions like these and you both handled people with real compassion and friendly professionalism.
Process
1. Designing from Principles (2021 – early 2022). An open-ended methodology was proposed around CCN’s core principles of – ensuring deliberations stayed rooted in real communities, were genuinely representative, and left room for the process to evolve as citizens’ priorities became clearer.
These, and five communities, which represented the diversity of “place” in Dumfries & Galloway were discussed and agreed with the Council and a cross-party working group.
2. Recruiting Representative Sub-Panels in Each Place (2021 – early 2022). Desk research and “learning visits” were conducted to each community to understand history, assets, current pressures and who needed to be at the table. Engagement included schools and anchor organisations to understand the diversity of geographies, demographies and interests.
Gradually, for each place, these led to one-to-one conversations with residents able to speak from lived experience rather than organisational agendas, and a deliberate focus on the typically under-represented. The aim was a group where most local residents would recognise “someone like them” on the panel in terms of age, gender, area, perspective or socioeconomic position.
3. Place-Based Whole-Day Panels (March – June 2022). Full-day in-person meetings were organised in each community (plus drop-in follow-ups) where the resident group came together to share and map important local assets, priorities for improvement and what holds them back, and co-design feasible practical projects to address them.
Prior to this, we had engaged with local young people — via primary and secondary schools, and youth clubs — who then represented their views and ideas within the meeting. Outcomes were presented visually on online whiteboards as systems diagrams, then shared back with participants for verification.
4. Cross-Community and Expert Witness Phases (Sept 2022 – Feb 2023). While the emphasis varied between the different communities, their outcomes shared 6 Priority Themes.
These structured a series of online meetings, where where citizens from all five places came together to discuss a particular Theme and related projects, experiences and issues. Using a structured consensus-building model, they reached agreement on a number of sub-priority actions for each.
An Expert Witness Panel of 50 people was recruited against strict criteria: commitment to show up, practical or technical expertise relevant to a particular Theme and the related projects and actions, real “changemaking” power, access to wider networks, belief in the process, and an ability to work across themes. Experts then joined citizen discussions as peers, grounding input in real-world examples and being open to challenge; where gaps remained, additional experts were invited to clarify the factual picture.
5. Final Synthesis and Regional Model (Early 2023). A concluding online phase brought selected citizens and experts together to share what had been agreed in the discrete Priority Theme streams, refine the 22 sub-priorities and map virtuous links between Themes.
This culminated in the citizen-led Regional Model for Net Zero Transition. Draft outcomes were iteratively checked back with each and every participants for accuracy, objections and consent before the report and methodology guide were completed.