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BUILD CAPA-CITIES

Cork City Council (CCC), working in partnership with Dublin City Council, have been awarded €1 million by the Net Zero Cities Consortium for a 2-year Mission Cities joint pilot project, running from September 2024 to 2026.

BUILD CAPA-CITIES (Behavioural Urban Insights & Lessons Deployed for Climate Action Policy Application - Communicated to Influence Transformative & Innovatively Embedded Sustainability) is enabling CCC to develop internal capacity in the area of behavioural science-informed approaches in the design and delivery of policies and actions as a means to deliver climate action.

The Cork element of the project (where UCC is a key delivery partner) uses insights to enhance the climate-positive impact of the local authority's work across a range of policy areas. This straddles two 2 main areas of activity:

  • Building up skills and capabilities of CCC staff to understand and apply techniques from behavioural science in the design and delivery of their work. Capacity building is being achieved through the design of a context- and organisation-specific micro-training course, run and accredited by UCC and which can contribute to staff professional development as part of the learning and development offer of CCC to its staff (and may be further rolled-out to other local authorities by the UCC Sustainability Academy).
  • Testing the application of behavioural science-informed approaches in the roll-out of the Open Streets initiative on pedestrianisation. In response to the recorded high demand for more people-friendly spaces within the city, this will identify a replicable methodology for implementing Open Streets on a wider scale while maximising participation, emissions reduction and co-benefits.

In both case, UCC will deploy Research Masters students to document the processes and outcomes of these activities for potential academic validation of the approaches to capacity building and to modal shift.

Implementation of BUILD CAPA-CITIES is being delivered on a cross-Directorate basis. An academic contact group from UCC’s Environmental Research Institute will support the project. External stakeholders funded by the project include the Cork Business Association, the Environmental Forum, and Lets Play Cork.

La Rochelle is the designated 'twin' for this pilot project.

More details on these projects...