Sustainable Communities

This project aimed to provide an innovative and interactive approach to identifying skills and training needs relevant to beginning to build effective sustainable communities. A key feature of the research involved developing an interrogative model to assist communities, policymakers and practitioners to identify those skills and knowledge required to make progress towards sustainability. The research used a mixed method approach of in-depth interviews and participant observation, and focused on four areas of production and consumption (food, energy, the home and transport) with the cross-cutting theme of community engagement.

As well as generating academic papers associated with the question of how to build more sustainable places, various policy briefings, and media outputs the research also produced a guidance document for communities, professionals, stakeholder groups and others- which identifies the priority learning, skills, training objectives and knowledge transfer needs required in pursuing sustainable community goals.