In search of public support for the heat transition – Dutch and British approaches

Author: Matthew Lockwood

An issue of central importance for heat transitions is public support and engagement. In the UK, levels of concern about climate change are at an all-time high, and net zero targets seem to enjoy strong support from the public at a general level. Yet there is concern amongst policy makers about how to ensure that the public will support the specific policies and measures needed to get to net zero. This includes the challenge of decarbonising heat in homes. With the need to build public acceptance of new technologies, like heat pumps, and challenging policies, like phasing out gas boilers, there is increasing interest in whether experiments such as Climate Assemblies can help build this acceptance.

In this context, one of the interesting contrasts between the UK and the Netherlands is the very different ways in which these two countries adopted targets and plans for decarbonisation.

The UK’s goals come from the 2008 Climate Change Act, amended in 2019 for the net zero target. The government asked the Climate Change Committee (CCC) to make judgements about the feasibility of long term targets (originally in 2008, and 80% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050, and then in 2018, a net zero target for 2050). The CCC produced a recommendation, which was then taken to Parliament, where MPs voted for it.

At one level, this was quite a technocratic process. The CCC is made up of experts (a majority are academics); they are not representatives of particular social and economic groups in society. They are very good technocrats, and they do consult widely, but in the end the point of the Committee is that it is supposed to be above politics.

At another level, the UK process does involve politics, since MPs in Parliament voted on both the original CCA and the net zero target, and there was some debate, but it is very much about representative politics. This was not a deep process of deliberative politics. It is clear that the concern of some in the UK about building public support for heat decarbonisation and other net zero policies reflects this reality.

By contrast, the Netherlands came to climate targets, and a plan for reaching them, through a Climate Agreement that was negotiated over 2018 and the first half of 2019 by 150 organisations, governing parties in a coalition government and opposition parties in Parliament. The discussions on sectoral targets and measures were held at ‘tables’ (including one on the built environment that worked on heat), with the process organised by a body called the Social and Economic Council.

These discussions involved expert inputs, but were also negotiations between representatives of different interest groups, including business organisations, labour unions, environmental and other NGOs, local government representatives and national government. Drafts produced in the Agreement went back and forth between the tables and the government and opposition political parties in the Parliament, until a compromise was reached that all stakeholders could sign up to. The final Agreement then fed directly into legislation and a climate plan. For the heat transition, the Agreement mandates municipalities to devise plans for all residential heating to move away from natural gas by 2030.

This is a very different approach to generating climate goals, which on the face of it looks far more deliberative, and more connected to the public through the huge range of organisations involved in the negotiations.

Yet despite this, there is some evidence that plans and actions outlined in the Agreement face some of the same lack of wider public engagement and support that seems present in the UK. On the one hand, there are examples where communities (or at least some people in them) are very engaged with and even leading heat transitions - for example in neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Nieuwkoop in South Holland. But on the other, there is resistance or opposition to heat transition plans elsewhere, for example as in Overvecht and Quirijnstok in Tiburg. At a national level, polling in mid-2019 revealed concerns about the costs of moving away from gas boilers to heat pumps. Support for the climate plan under the Agreement has slipped over time.

Why has this apparently more deliberative process in the Netherlands not delivered more unequivocal support for climate policies?

One factor seems to be changes in the nature of Dutch deliberative processes over the last fifty years, a theme brought out in an analysis of the Climate Agreement in an excellent MSc thesis by Gijs Kooistra at Raboud University. In the early part of the twentieth century, emerging out of a crisis over education policy, the so-called ‘Polder model’ of deliberation over policy by the key constituencies of business interests and labour unions was created. This was a classic form of corporatism in which these two so-called ‘social partners’ could co-decide policy with government. They negotiated on the basis of the interests that they represented, rather than on the basis of ideas. These organisations also had authority over their respective constituencies, which they could then effectively deliver in backing what was agreed by leaders. The Polder model was particularly important in determining in how the Netherlands responded to the economic crisis of the 1980s. However, over time many elements that gave the Polder model its power have grown weaker, and a different version of the Polder model has emerged. The traditional social partners (especially labour) play a smaller role and many new actors, such as environmental NGOs are brought in. Negotiations are on the basis of ideas rather than interests. Perhaps most importantly, it is no longer clear that the leaders of organisations involved in these new Polder model deliberations have the same authority over their membership that the old social partners did. These changes have given rise to a new label for the process – ‘Polder 2.0’.

At an even deeper level, because of religious and linguistic diversity, Dutch society and politics has long been based on mechanisms for finding political compromise. The Polder model is in this spirit. But this was never a process of mass involvement of the Dutch public; rather these were mechanisms for elites to reach agreement, with the understanding that leaders would then deliver the assent of their communities.

In the new world of Polder 2.0, then, it is not so clear that a deliberative process amongst the leaders of organisations can safely deliver mass acceptance of the outcome of the process in the same way. Indeed, so concerned is the Dutch government to get greater citizen engagement and participation on climate policy that it has commissioned a study of the possibility of running Citizen’s Assemblies on climate change.

In both countries, the search for engagement, participation and legitimacy (and sustaining these over time) goes on.