Grassroots retrofit: Community governance and residential energy transitions in the United Kingdom

Abstract Residential energy demand accounts for a significant proportion of the UK’s carbon emissions. As ~80% of the existing housing stock is expected to be in use by 2050, low carbon retrofit is essential in meeting climate and fuel poverty targets. Recent policy has failed to deliver retrofit at scale, leading to an emerging movement of grassroots initiatives approaching the challenge through community governance. This paper explores the role of these grassroots initiatives in the UK, identifying and evaluating how they address key barriers associated with delivering retrofit at scale, including engaging households, developing local supply chains and overcoming economic barriers. The research takes a qualitative approach with ten semi-structured interviews to understand the perspectives of community practitioners, intermediaries and policymakers. Our findings suggest community-led retrofit is effective at engaging households, can contribute to local supply chain development, help households access financing, and be a valuable delivery partner for local authority fuel poverty schemes. However, while community-led retrofit offers an alternative approach to retrofit governance, it is unlikely to deliver residential retrofit at scale without a broader government programme of financial and regulatory support.