How can environmental policy be locally appropriate, empowering and deliverable?

The prime minister launched the government’s 25 year plan for the environment at the beginning of the year, which included outline proposals for a new system of environmental land management, nature recovery networks, and a new principle of environmental net gain. While containing ambitious rhetoric, the real test of the plan will be the degree to which it results in positive changes on the ground. To do this, local actors must be engaged and empowered, local delivery mechanisms effective, and the different elements spatially coherent.

This policy workshop brought together policy makers, academics, practitioners and people from civil society organisations to explore what is needed for national environmental policy to translate into change on the ground and identify areas of policy that need further development. The workshop aimed to help inform government decisions so that they are locally appropriate, empowering and deliverable.

The workshop also explored the need to articulate why the local is important to environmental policy; what Brexit could mean for the ways in which environmental priorities are decided upon and delivered; and how the 25 year plan fits with other government policies that have a spatial component such as the industrial strategy, the clean growth strategy, on housing and devolution.

A summary report of the workshop can be found here.

Banner image from Jim Roberts Gallery via creative commons