With the Local Power Plan bringing renewed attention to community-led energy, there is now a clear opportunity to design programmes that help more communities shape, own and benefit from the energy transition.
However, capacity building cannot simply mean expanding support for those already well placed to act. Without careful design, new programmes risk reinforcing existing inequalities by concentrating resources in communities that already have strong networks, experience and access to funding.
Drawing on discussions from our Building Blocks launch webinar, this insight explores what future community capacity programmes need in order to be genuinely empowering: meaningful community leadership, long-term and flexible support, and a more targeted understanding of where capacity exists – and where it needs to be built.
In February, we launched ‘Building Blocks: Developing community capacity for a just transition’. This paper characterised ‘capacity’ in the context of the energy transition; the collective ability of a community to create, lead and take advantage of opportunities from decarbonisation and clean energy. It examined what has enabled grassroots organisations to drive net zero action successfully, and how capacity might vary across areas and demographics.
Building Blocks focuses on those more marginalised, lower-income communities who are often underfunded, overlooked and bear the brunt of industrial transitions. Following years of austerity, these communities lack the capacity to capitalise on the opportunities now presented by clean energy.
In the same week that the Building Blocks paper launched, Great British Energy (GBE) launched its long-awaited Local Power Plan, addressing exactly this question of how we build community capacity, as well as expanding opportunities for community ownership of energy infrastructure and broadening the benefits of net zero. Regen welcomes this clear acknowledgement of the social and economic benefits of community energy, and enthusiasm to support community-led energy initiative more comprehensively. However, unless there is careful consideration for how and where this capacity is built, this enthusiasm risks pooling in already established pockets of community action and leaving those perennially underserved communities on the outside of the conversation once again.
This blog reflects upon the discussions that took place during the Building Blocks launch webinar to explore three principles for placing justice and empowerment at the core of future capacity-building programmes:
Community led. Any capacity-building programme should be guided by a community’s needs and aspirations, and based on meaningful engagement – particularly with those from lower-income and more marginalised backgrounds.
Long term and flexible. Funding for capacity building should enable longer-term processes and be flexible to community experience and needs.
Targeted at areas with the most need. Mapping should be used to identify areas, organisations and networks that lack the time, resources and organisational support to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the energy transition.
Community led
Without specific funding for early-stage engagement and visioning processes, many communities, particularly those from lower-income and more marginalised backgrounds, might struggle to engage with, or even be aware of, the opportunities presented by capacity-building programmes.
Some might ask whether the responsibility of participating in the energy system is asking too much of communities, given the burdens that come with deepening inequality and the escalating cost of living. For many people, just surviving day-to-day uses up all of their financial and time resource. However, the panellists pointed to the fact that, as energy consumers, we all contribute to the maintenance of energy infrastructure. With many people pushed into extreme financial hardship by soaring bills and a system that is fundamentally not designed with their wellbeing in mind, everyone deserves to be involved in the conversation about how this system might and should change – and should be given appropriate support to benefit from it.
With the Warm Homes Plan and Local Power Plan both leading to an influx of new funding to support community-led energy initiatives and community capacity-building programmes, there is a risk that funding flows through existing delivery routes to established organisations that are aware of these opportunities and well-placed to act. Individuals in areas of greater affluence typically already have the time and resources to consider these opportunities and have social or professional links to existing energy organisations or the energy system more generally. There is a risk that new funding streams are tailored to feedback from these organisations and communities, which are already linked into networks of support.
“[In more affluent communities] there’s the freedom to experiment … there’s just the reality that wealth builds on wealth, networks build on networks”
– Clare Richards, Community Energy Scotland
For a capacity-building programme to be truly community-led, it will be vital to ensure that funding is channelled to new communities, with foundational engagement and participatory work essential to opening these programmes to as broad a range of people as possible. Where possible, capacity-building programmes should give people agency over which local needs they want to meet, including thinking about how a community might want a renewable energy project to benefit them in broader terms of wellbeing, social mobility and community resilience.
“It’s about changing the narrative from seeing communities, especially racialised and marginalised communities … as deficient communities … and actually changing that narrative and flipping it to acknowledge that they are actually knowledge holders”
– Zarina Ahmad, University of Manchester
Projects like Oldham Energy Futures and the ongoing Future Energy Landscapes programme are good examples of how to enable local people to think about and plan how the transformation of transport, heat and power could and should benefit them, and initiatives like the Community Energy Launchpad act as an important entry point for Scottish communities. These programmes also focus on the individual assets, networks and inherent knowledge of place that exist in all communities. Leading with an asset-based approach to engagement and collaboration can help bring these strengths to the fore and turn them into formalised plans and ambitions.
Long-term and flexible
The funding of current capacity-building programmes is often tied to tight financial cycles and heavily linked to short-term, project-based outcomes. This scope needs to become generational to address the consistent calls from the sector for long-term, multi-year capacity funding, and to reframe the metrics we use to judge the success of such actions.
As outlined in both the report and the panel discussion, funding for the community energy sector remains tightly bound to financial years and short timeframes. It is often heavily weighted towards project delivery, making the proactive support of capacity development challenging, meaning that groups, particularly those less resourced, can struggle to submit applications on time and subsequently stick to the tight timescales set for their work.
Until staged, multi-year funding is available, many communities, particularly those without prior experience in the energy sector, will have projects unnecessarily curtailed. GBE is actively exploring new funding channels and opportunities to support existing capacity-building programmes or organisations. GBE’s capacity-building programme should aim to provide longer-form funding that goes beyond project delivery, where possible, as well as more reactive funding to support specific project needs.
In addition, the success of capacity funding is often underestimated as key progress targets tend to be based around easily monitored, quantifiable metrics such as the number of projects delivered or total capacity of community-owned renewable generation (the Local Power Plan aims for 1,000 local and community energy projects by 2030, while the Scottish government is targeting 2 GW). While useful, these don’t fully capture whether and how capacity has been built; there isn’t a linear endpoint to the engagement and support provided by, for example, CARES development officers, who assist local groups in exploring and developing project ideas, and the relationships built aren’t purely transactional. As the panellists at the Building Blocks event noted, the benefits of time invested in engagement and collaboration in capacity-building programmes may not emerge for a few years or more – and may materialise even if they don’t immediately result in a community energy project. .
Even with frameworks such as Community Wealth Building, which does well to broaden the spectrum of benefits being quantified to those that play out over a longer period (such as job creation, upskilling opportunities and health and wellbeing outcomes), the lack of counterfactual remains a challenge; it’s always difficult to measure what would have happened in that area in the absence of community action. We need both a careful reframing of what we determine as success when it comes to existing funding streams, and different metrics that are more grounded in social and wellbeing improvements, to properly capture the value of extensive community engagement, collaboration, appetite building and visioning.
“Long-term support, long-term relationship building and giving people confidence, knowledge and the skills that are not just important for community energy projects, but that can also help to strengthen community bonds and resilience more generally … that’s so important”
– Clare Richards, Community Energy Scotland
Beyond capacity-building programmes, there could be further exploration of using Community Benefit Funds (CBF) to enable more flexible, long-term capacity building. The 9CC Group is a great example of a collaborative, long-term vision approach to distributing CBFs: collecting payments from wind farms on behalf of nine communities in the Cumnock and Doon Valley area, and then distributing them according to priority areas they identify. CBFs can also be used to provide core resourcing, allowing individuals to dedicate flexible professional time and support to local projects that can be absolutely crucial to their success.
Targeted at the areas of most need
Currently, capacity-building programmes are largely reactive and provide project-specific support to communities who already have enthusiasm, a need or an initiative they’re attempting to drive forward. To provide proactive support to communities outside these existing programmes, we need to comprehensively map the characteristics of community capacity at a local level across the UK and build a detailed understanding of where capacity does and doesn’t exist.
Building capacity requires understanding both where it should be built and how. The Building Blocks paper considers in particular the ‘how’ aspect of capacity building; synthesising the experience of organisations and individuals that have worked in this space for years and deeply understand how distinct social and economic pressures faced by low-income and marginalised communities can make engaging with technical energy issues or voluntarily managing complex projects challenging.
“There’s more to understand around capacity across the country, and that’s one of the key priorities for us before we put anything in place … [we want to] try to understand better what the local capacity is across each and every community”
– Alex Chatzieletherou, GB Energy
Existing capacity building programmes provide assistance and support to those who need it. Still, the staff at these organisations don’t always have the time, remit or resources to proactively identify specific areas or groups that aren’t engaging with the support offered, or where there is a need for more general early-stage visioning exercises rather than technical, energy-specific advice.
Understanding where capacity needs to be built is a matter of allocating resources to identify where key features of capacity (as presented in the Building Blocks paper, see Figure 1) are present and where capacity across these dimensions might be lacking. There was a sense from the webinar that there is an established ecosystem of funders, support organisations and knowledge-sharing networks, but that knowledge of on-the-ground capacity, place by place, is more limited.
The key building blocks of successful community action on energy. Graphic taken from Regen's Building Blocks paper
One such example of a mapping approach is Regen’s recent paper, ‘The Missing Link’, produced in collaboration with The Carbon Trust as part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme. This methodology combines climate risk data, socioeconomic vulnerability mapping and comprehensive identification of local community organisations. While this work was conducted for local authorities to inform their risk and resilience planning, similar mapping could be crucial for moving capacity-building programmes further towards proactive, collaborative approaches with existing community organisations that haven’t been involved in energy-related projects previously, or for identifying ‘coldspots’ where more foundational capacity-building is required.
Next steps
The Local Power Plan and wider government support for local and community energy represent a crucial window of time in which communities have the opportunity to take ownership of and benefit from energy infrastructure in ways they have yet been unable to. Building energy system-specific capacity is not, and should not be seen as, an opportunity to offload some of the hard work of the transition onto already exhausted and low-capacity communities. It should be a process of empowering communities that have been consistently overlooked and underfunded, providing them with an avenue to create projects with significant long-term socioeconomic and environmental benefits.
We’re very keen to keep the conversation going, so please do reach out with any thoughts on this insight piece, the Building Blocks paper itself, or more generally. You can reach me at revans@regen.co.uk.
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