This Rethinking Green Transitions project was a collaboration between London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Cities, policy makers from Islington Council, and a team of young peer researchers.
Synopsis
The project set out to answer two key questions, co-developed by the young researchers:
- How do young people think and feel about the transition to a green and just Islington?
- How can the council engage with, learn from, and respond to young people’s perspectives?
The project produced a report with 31 recommendations across 10 key themes for Islington. These are now being taken forward by various council teams, and the learnings and benefits of a peer researcher approach are being shared across the council.
The challenge
Despite being the age group who will likely benefit the most from the green transition, a 2023 YouGov survey found that just 9 per cent of young people aged 18 to 24 feel they have a significant say in climate decisions, highlighting a troubling disconnect. In Islington, a recent Liveable Neighbourhood consultation saw those under 25 making up less than 1 per cent of responses.
The project focused on Islington’s Liveable Neighbourhoods (LNs) programme, which struggles to engage with young residents. LNs aim to reduce traffic, improve air quality, enhance walking and cycling infrastructure, and create more welcoming public spaces. 70 per cent of Islington residents lack access to a car, a factor of most pertinence to young people who don’t have access to a car, the financial means to learns to drive, or are old enough to learn to drive. Therefore, the harms and benefits of car ownership are unevenly distributed. LNs served as a useful gateway to talk about wider green transitions, and how young people want to engage with the council, as well as what they want from the future of their neighbourhoods.
The project took place from August 2024 to July 2025.
In total, the project cost £30,000, covering staff costs of a researcher for one day a week at LSE Cities, paying the young peer researchers, paying participants, printing and design costs, paying a videographer, and hosting a launch event. The project was supported by two Islington Policy Officers.
Islington Council also covered some small costs, such as the cost of targeted ads to promote the survey, and the additional cost of an extra young peer researcher. Thus, the direct financial costs to Islington Council were small, with Islington’s main contribution being officer time and providing access to policymakers and young residents through the council’s connections to various youth hubs and schools.
During the project, we were also supported by Partnership for Young London (PYL), which provided several training sessions to the team and young people, and advisory support in-kind.
The solution
The project set out to hire four young peer researchers to co-design a research project with the project team from Islington Council and LSE Cities. As residents of Islington, they could provide insights into what matters most to them and their peers, and crucially, provide creative ideas for how the council can better engage their age cohort.
The researchers were recruited because of their diverse range of experiences of Islington, such as those who were lifelong residents, to those who had moved recently to work and study respectively. All young peer researchers were paid the London Living Wage in recognition of the value of their time and labour. The young peer researchers were not only involved in most decisions but had the final say on key research design decisions. They were equal partners with Islington Council and LSE Cities.
Young researchers were provided with training and support to make informed decisions at each stage of the process. It was vital that they gained skills and learning alongside the decisions that they were expected to make.
This project aimed to get the young researchers involved in as many aspects of the research as possible; establishing research aims, designing methods, stakeholder engagement, conducting interviews and focus groups, survey design, analysing data, report writing and communicating key findings at events and through a short film and social media.
The Liveable Neighbourhoods programme was chosen as the focus of this project by our peer-research team because it offers a practical and holistic way to explore the green transition at a local level, bringing together a range of interventions. These include improved public spaces, safer streets, greener infrastructure, and better access to walking, cycling and public transport. These are all elements that shape how residents experience their neighbourhoods day-to-day. LNs have also struggled to engage with young people, which is why it was an appropriate focus for the research.
The young researchers were trained in interview methods, facilitating focus groups, designing surveys, and public speaking by Partnership for Young London, LSE and Islington Council staff. The young peer researchers then conducted interviews and focus groups with young people and key policymakers at Islington Council. They then co-designed a survey aimed at young people (aged 16 to 26 years) in the borough. After completing the data collection phase, the research team worked with PYL to analyse the data from the survey, interviews and focus groups, coming up with the structure of the report and identifying findings.
We then held a workshop at Islington Council to refine our analysis and co-develop recommendations together with policymakers from across different services. The young peer researchers then co-wrote the report with team members from Islington and LSE and spoke at the launch event about their experiences of the project.
The impact
Through interviews, workshops, creative methods and a survey, the team engaged 158 young people and 20 policymakers to understand what makes a neighbourhood truly ‘liveable’ for young people, and how best to engage with young people. The findings highlight the importance of linking climate action to social justice, prioritising safety, and improving access to green and social spaces.
The report offers ten themes of recommendations (with more specific sub-recommendations) ranging from safer cycling and free bike provision to co-designed communication and tailored climate education, all aimed at making green transitions more inclusive, equitable, and youth-influenced.
These recommendations are now being taken forward by respective teams in the council, such as Communications, Transport, Green Space, and Active Travel.
Through these recommendations, Islington can hopefully make changes that will help people to make choices that aid the green transition and create an opportunity for more systemic change.
These recommendations address the dual aims of the project. They address the wants and needs of young people for the future of the borough in which they live. The recommendations also provide useful ways in which the council can better engage young people in meaningful ways.
This age group is one that the council has consistently struggled to engage with. Through providing suggestions for how the council can better engage young people, the project should lead to improved youth engagement across council projects, allowing more work to benefit from the creative insights that young people bring.
The experience of working with the young peer researchers has been extremely valuable for the council and the peer researchers themselves. As one of our young peer researchers reflected:
Working on this project has been so valuable and insightful. I feel as though I’ve learnt new skills, engaged with new topics and contributed to meaningful outputs. I really enjoyed getting to lead focus groups, having real conversations with young people in Islington. I also really enjoyed our site visits and getting to see the areas in which our research could help make a difference. I found some of the analysis challenging but enjoyed doing something I don’t usually do and learning a new skill, which I will be able to apply in other contexts.” said one of our young peer researchers
The project has also started to disseminate findings both across the council and on a pan-London basis. The project had an early spotlight as part of the LSE Festival in June. Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, spoke as part of a panel discussion, with one of our young researchers, and Islington’s executive member for Environment, Air Quality & Transport. During the panel discussion, and in a subsequent blog, Mete Coban complimented both the approach of this project and the recommendations.
Young people are not short on ideas or passion. What they need are opportunities and platforms to turn that passion into action. By engaging young people in their work, LSE, young researchers like Maanya, and local authorities like Islington Council, are leading game-changing new approaches to youth engagement, which others can harness and recreate.”said Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy
How is the new approach being sustained?
The research team are now supporting other teams in the council to take forward the recommendations. These include working with teams such as Transport Projects, Active Travel, Parks, Green Space, Community Safety, Culture, and Community Partnerships.
Some of these team members who are taking forward recommendations have been engaged in various ways during the project. These ranged from running training sessions to inform our young researchers about the Liveable Neighbourhood programmes, providing guided walks around the borough about some of the recent and forthcoming changes as part of the LN programme, taking part in interviews with young researchers, and attending a workshop developing policy recommendations in collaboration with the young people.
Engaging the relevant policymakers who will ultimately be the officers implementing the recommendations throughout the process has helped the team to design recommendations and align them with strategic priorities.
Islington is now developing a toolkit to use internally for other council officers, to share learning from the project, to support other colleagues to conduct peer research and offer advice on how to best partner with external partners such as academia.
Islington Council already has a strategic partnership with University College London (UCL), which makes collaborating with academics from UCL easier. However, as our relationship with LSE did not have this established relationship and wraparound corporate support, there are learnings that we can share with colleagues if they are entering into an academic partnership beyond the UCL strategic partnership.
LSE Cities has also secured additional funding to share the learnings from the project with other local authorities, in collaboration with PYL. From November 2025, we’ll be convening a pan-London conversation about youth engagement in climate policy, led by a new team of young peer researchers, including at least one representative of the Islington team.
One of Islington Council’s five missions is the ‘Empowering People’ mission. This involves people having more control over decisions and services that impact them. This project has helped illustrate the benefits of pursuing a deliberative engagement approach to our work, through the creativity of the proposals, the trust it has helped build with young people, and insights from a group that Islington struggled to hear from.
The learnings from this project have supported the principles of Islington’s Empowering People mission, to the benefit of our residents who were involved in the project, and residents in the borough more widely.
Lessons learned
For both Islington Council and LSE Cities, this sort of collaborative peer research project was a first. There were numerous lessons learned, which include:
Involve peers, researchers at the right time
On reflection, we were still scoping out the project when we hired the young researchers, and we could have benefited from involving them later but more intensely, rather than evenly throughout the project. There is always a balance between directing a peer research project towards maximum impact and allowing enough space for co-design. In future, we might consider being more targeted about concentrating on the co-design work.
Fair reward and recognition of young peer researchers
We paid all young researchers the London Living Wage. However, we knew the involvement for them was more than financial, so we tried to offer them opportunities such as training and public speaking opportunities, which would then help them in their future careers. However, one challenge was that there were sometimes opportunities that arose for the young people that were unpaid, and balancing this can be tricky when we’d agreed to pay the young peer researchers for their time.
Fair reward and recognition for participants
Paying participants and meeting people where they are, such as in schools, youth clubs or other groups, was important for engaging young people, rather than expecting them to come to us. We gave vouchers to all who took part
Appropriate file sharing: A small but significant issue when working between two organisations is ensuring documents can be shared and worked on collaboratively easily. We created a dedicated SharePoint that we all had access to, but at times, there were issues with sharing things, which required setting up an additional Islington-only SharePoint to share documents internally.
Learn the best communication channels
We found that communicating with the young researchers via WhatsApp was much better than email.
Involve a holistic group of policymakers
We involved a wide range of policymakers at the policymaker workshop, as the findings covered many areas of the council’s work. However, there were still teams that retrospectively would have been beneficial to include earlier.
Utilise young people’s networks
When promoting both the recruitment of young researchers and trying to secure interviews with young people, and promoting the work, utilising the existing networks of young people of other council colleagues was important.
Benefits of alternative presentation of findings: The young people were keen to have outputs that went beyond a traditional report. Creating a film helped communicate the findings more visually; however, had resources allowed, we would have created more short-form video content.
Collaborate with experts: The team reached out to Partnership for Young London to ask for some informal advice. This turned into running several training sessions collaboratively with PYL and the young researchers. PYL were an invaluable partner and helped the project partners, who were both comparatively inexperienced in youth, peer research.
Shorter survey design
We aimed for it to be filled out in five to 10 minutes, but it was more like 20 minutes, potentially putting people off completing the survey.
Direct approaches work for survey outreach: When trying to promote the survey, we used some targeted social media ads, which increased responses. However, we found the best approach was to go to where young people are, through a trusted gatekeeper. This worked best when we attended a green careers morning at a school and asked the young people to fill out the survey whilst we spoke to them about green careers in local government.
Data saturation
There was a large amount of qualitative data through interviews, focus groups, a survey and a workshop. This meant the analysis stage was very time-consuming. If we were to do the project again with similar time constraints, we would shorten the survey and conduct fewer focus groups and interviews.