In the NetZeroCities Opinion Series, leading voices at the forefront of urban transition share personal perspectives on the pivotal issues shaping Europe’s journey to climate-neutral cities. In this first article, Joanna Kiernicka-Allavena, Deputy Director of NetZeroCities, examines why climate transformation requires more than robust strategies, and why understanding people may be the most important challenge cities have yet to address.
People hold contradictory values simultaneously. They respond to the same information differently depending on who delivers it, and in what moment of their lives it reaches them. They are moved by things that have no place in a strategy document: fear, loyalty, pride, fatigue, the memory of a previous failure, the trust or distrust accumulated over years with a particular institution. And the moment an indicator is put against our behaviour and we realise it, we almost always perform what we think is expected rather than what we actually believe.
In cities, this compounds. We are not dealing with one human system. We are dealing with dozens of nested human systems: citizens inside communities, inside institutions, inside political structures, inside European frameworks, each with its own logic and its own resistance. Transformation has to move through all of that. Our working frameworks implicitly assume it will, smoothly.
Urban climate transformation is typically imagined as a relationship between two groups: the people who lead the change, and the citizens they engage. That binary is not just narrow. It is a design error. It renders invisible the entire ecosystem the transformation actually depends on: every person inside the governance levels above and below the city, every employer whose workplace culture shapes how hundreds of people think about time, effort and civic responsibility, every professional community, every institution, every informal network through which norms and behaviours actually travel. None of these are “leads.” None are “citizens.” All are humans whose understanding, trust and motivation the transformation needs, and whom current programme design does not reach.
When we say “engage citizens,” we mean people in their domestic lives, as residents, as consumers, as voters. We do not mean the same people at work, where they spend the majority of their waking hours, where their habits and values and sense of what is normal are often shaped far more powerfully than at home. A 2019 peer-reviewed study of over 800 employees found that pro-environmental workplace cultures change how people behave outside work too. Cities almost never design for this. The workplace as a site of transformation barely exists in the urban climate toolkit. The school-to-parents pipeline is the one partial exception, and even that treats the school as a transmission mechanism rather than as a human community with its own culture and dynamics.
We do not have a strategy problem. We have a perception we are not seeing the full human system we are trying to move.
Why does this observation tend to stop at private agreement? Because taken seriously, it is inconvenient, even embarrassing, unsettling. It implies that a significant part of what the field produces, from strategic frameworks to evaluation methodologies, rests on an assumption that does not consistently hold. Silently agreeing costs nothing. Disclosing something openly that poses a massive challenge, and then acting on the implication, costs a great deal.
If human complexity is the terrain and not a variable to be managed, then transformation programmes have to change, and not at the margins. Every single person the transformation depends on has to be in the design: the senior official who privately doubts the timeline, the mid-level manager who was never brought into the conversation and now works around it, the employer whose commuting policy shapes the daily choices of five hundred people, the resident who has never heard of a Climate City Contract but whose behaviour the whole strategy is trying to shift. Each carries a different understanding, a different horizon of concern, a different history with institutions asking things of them. None of that disappears because a strategy is well-designed. Time horizons have to match the pace at which people, all of them, not just the ones in the room, actually change.
Transformation requires human system change as a precondition. Not a byproduct.
In organisational development, in what the best city support practitioners do intuitively, in workplaces that have discovered their culture shapes behaviour far beyond their walls, the pieces exist. What is missing is a coherent argument for why it needs to be central to urban climate transformation strategy, not a footnote.
It is not sufficient. And I think we know it.
The next iteration of this work, ours and the field’s, has to take the human system seriously as the central design challenge. Not as a reminder to communicate better or to do stakeholder mapping. As the core question: what actually has to be true, in institutions and in people, for transformation to hold?
For a decade, we have built the structures. We have barely touched the people who have to carry them. That is what comes next.
The gap is not knowledge alone. It is the relational capacity to carry what we know through a human system without losing it, and the honesty to admit how much we do not know yet.
This is not a question for programme designers alone, or for city leaders, or for funders. It is a question for everyone the transformation depends on, which it turns out is all of us. In whatever role we occupy, at whatever level, seen or unseen by the frameworks.
We have known it in rooms where nobody said it out loud. The question is no longer whether we see the problem. It is whether we are willing to design as if we do.
We are starting with a question that does not yet exist in programme design: who are the humans this has to move through, and what will it actually take. Naming what is missing is the easy part. Building it is the work.
Author: Joanna Kiernicka-Allavena
