EU-wide climate action programmes draw together consortiums of actors – bureaucrats, civil society, consultancies – but these are commonly people of the same ethnicity and education. This is exclusive, and problematic. There’s many more actors with roles and ideas for change – artists, grassroots groups, researchers, and people with lived experience. Absence of diverse actor types diminishes collective agency for change.
Systemic change takes collaboration across diverse actors, centering those commonly marginalised from design processes. We’re an NGO working with EU governments on democratic climate action. We’ll share open source self-mapping tools made for bureaucrats to honestly examine which actors are excluded in climate work, because hearing the same voices repeatedly won’t solve the problems of our time. These tools are being used in the NetZeroCities project supporting up to 100 cities in reaching climate neutrality by 2030, and in other European-wide projects in areas of energy transition and nature-based solutions.