Led by The University of Manchester, JUST brings together the universities of Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, and Newcastle, and a range of partners in the policy, innovation, business, local government, community and voluntary sectors. 

The Institute for Community Studies at the not-for-profit organisation The Young Foundation is the core partner. The Centre studies and works with initiatives across the North of England that are pursuing sustainability transformations that are people-centred, joined-up and socially just.

Members of the Climate Citizens group lead on work on democratic innovation within the JUST Centre. We are exploring how the initiatives the Centre is studying and working with are contributing the democratisation of environmental and climate policy, as well as a broader democratic rejuvenation of the UK. Group members involved in this project are: Jacob Ainscough, Rebecca Willis, Ceri Holman and Pete Bryant.

See the JUST Centre website hhttps://www.just.ac.uk/ere for more information.

From wind farms and solar farms, to forestry plantations for carbon capture, many ‘industrial-scale’ national climate solutions need the countryside for their successful execution.

At the same time, other environmental challenges emerge for rural areas (such as poor public transport, less efficient homes, and land purchase impacts) but often do not attract the same level of policy focus or funding. There is also a strong relationship between rural places and conservative/right-of-centre voting patterns in England. When climate solutions are discussed by policy makers, they are frequently framed in a way that ostracises conservative audiences, even though they may be the ones hosting the proposed solution. Similarly, our research has found that whilst everyone across the political spectrum says that political identity should be very low down on the list of selection criteria for citizens’ assemblies, right-of-centre audiences actually have significantly lower support for Climate-related assemblies in principle, and are likely to engage. Those right-of-centre volunteers that do participate tend to do so because they have very strong opinions against climate solutions. Therefore, right-of-centre world views and values need to be better hosted in climate policy creation, including making sure deliberative groups have political identity selection criteria.

Place-based research in West Cumbria - an area whose history and identity has been shaped by the presence of different energy infrastructures - explored how changing energy economies shape local outlooks and people’s desires for the future.

• How do people relate to a ‘net-zero’ transition?

• What difference did proposals for a new coal mine make to people’s future preferences?

The project was a joint venture between Lancaster Environment Centre and climate charity CAfS (Cumbria Action for Sustainability) and formed the Doctoral thesis for Dr. Pancho Lewis. You can read his thesis here.