Local Voices, Cleaner Air: How cities can harness the power of communities to drive ambitious clean air action

In cities around the world, ambitious air quality action is possible when it reflects how people live, work, and move. Community engagement makes this happen by bringing residents into the policies and programmes that affect their lives. It helps cities design and implement them more effectively and sustain action over time.

Through grassroots and city-driven community engagement, Breathe Cities is supporting cities around the world to put communities at the heart of air quality action. This resource builds on these efforts, drawing together existing resources and experience. It provides practical guidance for policymakers and other institutions supporting cities and governments, while responding to common challenges cities face when embedding community engagement in their work. When done well, engagement results in policies and programmes that respond to people’s needs. It gives communities the data and information they need to make informed choices and shape action, builds trust and buy-in, improves how problems are understood, captures what can be missed by technical data, and connects clean air action to wider issues and opportunities that matter for sustained change. While engagement must be tailored to each context, cities do not need to start from scratch. They can build on tested approaches that already work.

This resource is organised around three core steps:

• Define who to engage
• Determine an engagement approach
• Put engagement into practice