Navigating the politics of climate action

For over twenty years, I have worked at the intersection of climate policy, political research, and organisational strategy. Through my roles as local authority Cabinet Member for Climate and Planning, director of national climate programmes for a major national energy charity, and PhD researcher in political attitudes to climate policy, I have repeatedly seen that the biggest barriers to climate action are not technical. Rather, they are about navigating the competing values, political ideologies, and institutional inertia that create the gap between high-level declarations on climate action and the day-to-day decisions that thwart delivery of it.

All public sector organisations face these challenges. A university may declare a climate emergency but find implementation stalling because governing bodies, academic experts, and operational teams hold fundamentally different views about acceptable risk and appropriate trade-offs. A council may commit to net zero but struggle with internal political alignment, or when residents with different political values respond to the same policy in different ways.

My work surfaces these value conflicts rather than papering over them. Using research methods from political psychology and deliberative democracy, I help organisations understand what they are actually navigating. This includes both strategic consulting for large institutions facing challenges implementing climate action (such as universities and combined authorities) through to the development of research-based tools and data that help even the smallest of Parish councils understand the political attitudes and practical constraints that limit climate action within their communities.

When these dynamics are properly understood, climate policy and strategy can be designed to work with different values rather than against them. Properly designed consultation genuinely engages people rather than alienating them, and internal decision-making processes can acknowledge trade-offs honestly, rather than avoiding them. The co-benefits of climate action, such as reduced costs, improved health, and community resilience, can be made central to a workable climate strategy by paying careful attention to how different groups define fairness, risk, and responsibility.

Through strategic consulting, deliberative research, and practical training, I help public sector organisations navigate these challenges.