ACCTING mobilizes research experimentation and innovation to advance an inclusive and socially just European Green Deal, where nobody is left behind. It specifically focuses on inequalities produced and reproduced in the context of Green Deal policy and interventions.
The overall objectives are to:
- Understand the impact of Green Deal policy initiatives on individual and collective behaviours with specific attention to vulnerable groups.
- Provide evidence and empower policymakers and other stakeholders to anticipate policy responses, the potential negative impacts on inequalities, and to mitigate such impacts in Green Deal decision-making;
- Co-creatively design and implement pilot actions to be deployed by policymakers and stakeholders in the policy domains of the Green Deal with the ambition to reduce or prevent inequalities and promote participation and social justice.
Building on previous research initiatives, ACCTING proposes an interdisciplinary conceptual and methodological framework, inspired by strategic policy design-thinking. It collects new data on Green Deal policy interventions at individual, community, organizational and societal levels.
Starting with an extensive mapping and comparative analysis of bottom-up environmental initiatives in 34 countries, including the collection of 410 narratives followed by 41 experimental studies from eight research lines, results are fed into Open Studios to cocreate innovative solutions. Results are used for further experimentation, including through pilot actions with mass implementation and high impact potential.
ACCTING combines activities devoted to experimental research and innovation, action research, co-creation of sustainable impact, robust impact evaluation and wide disseminations. It relies on its consortium of 12 European partners with an experience of 50+ EU funded projects, multidisciplinary teams, involving experts from multi-sectoral networks and stakeholders.
ACCTING contributes to the success of the Green Deal programme with a range of research activities on how to avoid and reduce the unequal effects of both climate change and of the policy responses to climate change, in different local and national contexts.
Furthermore, it aims to identify, make visible, and learn from the inspiring changes that are happening on the ground, often with the initiative of marginalised groups and the younger generation (Nagar 2019). In recent years, women and youth have emerged as significant political actors in citizen-led initiatives for change. ACCTING will bring them together in Open Studios, i.e., innovative forums for participatory policy dialogue and co-creation (Boyer et al. 2011) – and expand upon them in developing new policy suggestions. Climate change requires radical changes at both individual and collective levels. This can feel overwhelming and disempowering for citizens and policymakers.
Making already successful initiatives on the ground visible and learning from them is particularly important for engaging others as change actors, providing an alternative for “climate trauma” (Craps 2020) in the form of “active hope” (Macy & Johnstone 2012). ACCTING will provide the platform for this. ACCTING addresses these multidimensional, multilevel and local-global issues to produce knowledge and jointly analyse social practices and behavioural change processes, including enabling and inhibiting factors, share international best practice, tools and resources, and to implement experimentation on priority issues to understand the impacts on and of the European Green Deal.
Many projects have studied drivers, social practices and factors that stabilise them, enabling and inhibiting factors, best practice platforms, collective learning tools, etc., many of them by the ACCTING consortia partners (see table 1.3.1b). What is new is that ACCTING delivers an interdisciplinary combination of different issues across multiple areas of Green Deal interventions (biodiversity, clean energy, climate action, farm to fork, and sustainable mobility); the great innovative strength of ACCTING is to look at the greater picture where people make trade-offs between the different issues and across areas of interventions.
