Community designed governance? Embracing disagreement and conflict within local sustainability transitions

<p dir="ltr">Traditional governmental and legal frameworks are not built to handle the demands of the Climate Crisis, a dynamic and ever-compounding threat requiring a rapid response. After an initial literature review (Chapter 2) and involvement within a regional government, the aim of this thesis was to investigate and generate a sovereignty-based, community-designed governance and policy framework, to enable a rapid systemic transition to networked Net Zero innovations.</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis explores the design process of this alternative framework for governance and policy at the local government level, via a single case study within the boundaries of Essex County Council in the United Kingdom. Stakeholders were engaged in a participatory creation process via the expansion of an existing participant community, which grew to include Policyworkers, Businesses, and Representatives of Publics, based upon a blend of methodologies and philosophies developed for the specific context of my case study (Chapter 3).</p><p dir="ltr">Firstly this community was engaged through semi-structured interviews, investigating the imagined future role stakeholder communities might play in Net Zero policy generation which revealed four key thematic tensions built around trust, fear, fatigue, and commitment (Chapter 4). The analysis of these interviews generated the first building blocks for the alternative framework, which was built-out via two participatory co-creation workshops using a blend of Participatory Action Research strategies, Transitions Management methods, and Socio-Legal elements to create a methodological framework that could be used to develop local governmental policy for advancing sustainability transitions (Chapter 5).</p><p dir="ltr">Reflections on the observed tensions throughout the course of this thesis are explored through an ethnographically inspired account, specifically concerning the tensions of the self, the community, and academia (Chapter 6). Finally all three findings chapters are brought together in a policy-oriented discussion (Chapter 7) where the alternative framework was provided along with six policy recommendations designed for my case study region, which were situated within current academic discourse.</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis took Law as the base point of policy development, in that it examined constitutional foundations within the United Kingdom that provide power to local governments; however this thesis does not propose nor analyse statute or case Law beyond these foundational points. A key contribution of this research was the demonstration of a unique interdisciplinary research intersection, specifically by bridging the gap between Social Sciences and Law. Alongside practical policy creation, this thesis presented future avenues for greater academic-governmental collaboration and reflections on conducting research in times of societal crisis.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr"><br></p>