Case Study: Embedding Community Voice in Bradford’s Climate Action Plan
How HDRC Partnership Strengthened Policy, Evidence, and Local Capacity
Overview
In 2025, Bradford Council Sustainability Service partnered with the Bradford Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) collaborative Evidence into Policy Hub with the University of York to bring a new dimension to its emerging Climate Action Plan: direct insight from communities. Through the Net Zero community research project, HDRC Bradford helped shift the conversation, placing the lived experiences, priorities, and values of residents at the heart of climate policy development.
This case study describes how the collaboration evolved, the impact it had, and how it is shaping future policy, learning, and organisational culture within Bradford Council.
The Challenge
For Bradford’s Climate Action Plan to be inclusively developed, it required a strong connection to the daily realities, needs, and motivations of its communities. This research elevated the early Climate Action Plan engagement work that the Council’s Sustainability Team conducted with communities and neighbourhoods, by introducing a place-based approach. This place-based approach focussed directly on engaging and interacting with residents for this purpose, using IMD factors. The early engagement work that the Council had carried out tended to be hosted at public or Council venues and was geared more around established community groups and VCSE sector representatives. This study offered more direct access founded upon local, trusted relationships. Without community-led research or evidence, the Climate Action Plan and related policies could be less effective, less equitable, and less trusted by residents.
Working in partnership with the HDRC
HDRC Bradford and the Sustainability Service coproduced the research proposal through a bespoke Project Steering Group, establishing a shared approach grounded in community training, participatory workshops, and qualitative data collection. HDRC Bradford provided expert project management aligned to the Climate Action Plan timeline, research leadership and methodological guidance, training for community researchers, ensuring accessible and inclusive participation, additional funding streams (£11,000 from the Valuing Voices Fund at University of York, funded by the Welcome Trust and £20,000 from the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at the University of York) to extend research scope and connections to partner organisations across Bowling & Barkerend and Tong.
The project
HDRC Bradford led an extensive programme of community involvement that included recruiting and training six community researchers, partnering with two local community groups, and organising a three part series community workshops across two wards with 30 participants. This led to the development of thematic content with the Sustainability Service, synthesising findings and producing community climate manifestos, and feeding insights through the Steering Group into the Climate Action Plan’s development. The project intentionally widened eligibility to people who lived in or had strong ties to the two focal areas, recognising that people’s sense of community did not map neatly onto ward boundaries.
Achievements
A New Community Lens for Climate Action
The research led directly to supporting the need for the inclusion of a dedicated community climate action section in the Climate Action Plan approved by Bradford Council’s Executive in December 2025. This represented a significant cultural shift, elevating community voice from “nice to have” to a strategic priority.
Evidence for Broader Policy and Strategy
The insights generated now form an evidence base for:
- Transport Strategy development
- Local Plan considerations
- Comments made by the Sustainability Team in its consultee role
- Ongoing Climate Action Plan projects and monitoring
“Kelli has been really inspirational. The way the events have been organised and run, it’s taught us a lot about community involvement.”
Impact
The project’s primary impact was local, shaping internal strategy across the Council and partners. Notable areas of influence include:
- Policy Framing: shifting conversations away from purely technological solutions toward community action and cobenefits.
- Policy Design: embedding local qualitative evidence into the Climate Action Plan.
- Implementation: informing our understanding of community needs for ongoing and future climate action planning – for example, informing our communications approaches, use of relatable language and making it relevant to the daily lives of residents.
- Agenda Setting: contributing to wider partnership thinking, with potential influence on the future Sustainable Delivery Partnership for the district.
- Capacity building for staff in areas such as community involvement methodology and coproduction approaches.
Summary
The Council noted that it would likely have needed to commission external work to achieve comparable levels of community engagement, particularly given the diversity of participants reached in this project. Bradford HDRC therefore provided both financial value and unique research expertise that would have been difficult to replicate otherwise. The Net Zero community research project marks a pivotal step in Bradford’s journey toward a more inclusive, evidence driven climate strategy. By embedding community voices into the Climate Action Plan, HDRC and the Council cocreated a more grounded, equitable, and actionable policy framework. There is strong potential to apply this approach to other policy areas.
More than just a research project, this was a catalyst, shaping organisational culture, enriching policymaking tools, and building lasting capacity for community engaged climate action.