How can local authorities & developers best support CRAGs?

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

All local councils should have an Energy Conservation Officer (or similar, by statute). In our case (Sevenoaks), she was really keen to see a CRAG set up because it promised community support for initiatives the council had already started. She managed to put out a press release for our launch and brought a lot of good resources and information to the opening meeting – as well as having good contacts! We have had offers to trial electricity monitors as a result.

I’d like to see more contacts between CRAGs and councils. After all, they do have a legal duty to improve energy efficiency. CRAGs offer them an opportunity to outreach into the community, whilst they can support CRAGs with publicity, resources and contacts.

Guy S

website team CRAGger Islington

Yes, as ‘place-shapers’, in the new lingo, local authorities should be getting in there with the community initiatives…

I’m in Islington CRAG and not aware we’ve yet had much contact with the local council, but am also involved in Transition Town Brixton which has. V useful and supportive so far. But in general I think the most useful thing councils can do still is not simply attend civic meetings and look sympathetic, but highlight sources of funding. Climate-related community activism is exciting, but will eventually go the way of the Local Agenda 21 initiatives without material backing. The energy of the original volunteers will diminish, people will become disillusioned if not concrete gains, etc. Sorry! That sounds overly pessimistic – after all CRAGs have come quite a way on nothing more than good ideas and voluntary effort so far. But… LAs could definitely help, and the most helpful ways ultimately are promotion and grants.

More subtly, and strictly for ambitious councils only, this could involve offering to trial some form of prototype carbon trading scheme. I am thinking here of something along the lines of a localised green loyalty card, reward-based rather than punitive, designed to improve ‘carbon literacy’. It wouldn’t be personal carbon trading but it would be a useful step down the road. I’m thinking of pushing for this where I live but it’s pretty tricky, requiring a lot of buy-in from different stakeholders, and of course some form of electronic data storage system which presumably would cost a lot.

As I say… requires an ambitious council. Know any that might be keen? :)

tomchance

CRAGger Peckham

Thanks for your replies, David and Guy. A few followup questions…

What sort of contacts have you found, or would you find, most useful?

Funding certainly sounds like something councils could help with, but how much do you think your CRAG could realistically put to good use over the next few years, and what would it go towards? Maybe a council could look to fund a full time internal position to coordinate, promote or fundraise for a local CRAG?

Has anyone managed to get a council to join up to these initiatives itself? In other words, not just supporting and promoting but also imposing a carbon/oil budget on its own activities, and linking this up with a local CRAG/Transition Town initiative.

john ackers

website team CRAGger Islington

Tom

I talk to council officers and members in Islington about CRAGs but haven’t pushed CRAGs because I don’t think are really ‘council ready’. For example, I think the we need more experience about recruiting into a CRAG, do you need high emitters, how do you maintain trust, do you itemise all public transport trips, what’s the ideal size, can dysfunctional CRAGs be repaired etc. Then there are the meetings; Islington is now switching to optional monthly meetings and 3 monthly not so optional meetings and it looks like we may stay with a six month accounting period. Shannon says here that “The CRAGs are very DIY and that is a big part of their charm but it is also part of what excludes some people.” That’s a problem for a council – we have to reduce the DIY element; brainstorming required.

Also many CRAG members have some kind of activism or campaigning background and have an unusually high level of commitment. I also think there needs to be a small incentive to encourage main stream participation; it need not be money but I don’t know what that is.

Outreach as you (Tom) say, is a key issue. Not sure I agree with David’s comment ‘CRAGs offer [councils] an opportunity to outreach into the community’ – that would be true if the CRAGs already existed! We need to brainstorm this with council officers.

The IT support situation is also fluid. We still need to find and road test a website that CRAGgers can use and that comes with an adequate level of support for CRAGgers and the group accountant. It may be that that support would need eventually need funding if there were a lot of users.

Islington Council is currently putting time and effort into its climate change partnership (with businesses) and that should deliver more emissions reduction than quite a lot of local CRAGs. I think the best thing that councils can do right now is to encourage residents to 1) work out what their carbon footprint and 2) promoting CRAGs as Guy suggests 3) help seed some new CRAGs. It would be good if some more council officers created or joined CRAGs. Linking up with energy conservation officers is useful as well as David says but my experience is that they seem to be clinging onto their traditional role of getting indivduals out of fuel proverty rather than getting individuals out of 747s.

I tend to agree with David about funding not being needed for directly for CRAGs. Guy, what do you think funding would be used for?