Week 18 [Canada, Norway, Ukraine & Norwich]

I had a lovely supervisorial meeting with Sarah this week, where I managed to refine the training elements of my PAF and resubmit with some minor additions – all done!

Now I get to turn my attention to developing my scoping for environmental artefacts and understanding the wider challenges in evidencing and achieving environmental regulatory change. This week I’ve decided to break down my efforts by country as this feels like the best way to share my experience of pulling together the global authorities we will need to work with to understand the scale of what the PhD is attempting to achieve.

Canada: The toolkit

I’ve been working with the lovely team at the Canadian Live Music Association for a while now, specifically on projects involving climate adaptation and accessibility. As I have reduced my consultancy commitments to tackle my PhD, I have kept the Canadians warm as they have some amazing research and insights that are world leading in many ways. The key value proposition to completing delivery of the Sustainable Live project is that I have shared the experience of creating a toolkit that interconnects federal, regional and local operations through the lens of cultural and environmental protections. Deploying this in the form of a toolkit that can be adapted for local contexts helps to create a dual axis of standardisation and specialisation in applying solutions – a heck of a tightrope to navigate when trying to refer to unified standards that may need to be implemented asymmetrically.

Norway: The infrastructure

I had a lovely call this week from the Kulturedirektoratet in Norway. I’ve had dealings with them before (as well as Oyafestivalen during COVID) so it was nice to reconnect, but even nicer to be asked to go to Oslo later this year to share research insights and attend workshops and roundtable with various organisations and departments. As part of this trip, I’m going to make them show me around their green energy infrastructure for events in the city, a trick I’m going to repeat in the Netherlands when the Municipality of Amsterdam will be sharing similar insights. The appears to be an ambition to establish a Nordic/UK/Canadian axis of knowledge exchange and research alignment around the challenges presented by extreme weather events and adapting to climate change in advance of impacts. I think helping to establish and coordinate this network will help me stay connected at an international government level with relevant political and economic partners of the UK, and explore the potential for international impact of the PhD in providing a template for cities to enact environmental regulatory change at a sub-national/civic government level within local legislative contexts.

Ukraine: The innovation

I can’t really go into too much detail on this yet, but there are emerging conversations about helping to share event-adjacent practice and protocols that have been developed in the country over the past four years.

Norwich: The solution

“Have you been to Norwich?” was the first question I asked the table of people debating the challenges involved with upgrading things like 'feeder pillars' and working with people called 'DNOs' when Liverpool’s civic and academic leaders met last week.

Yes, one person had been to Norwich, but a very long time ago.

I asked the question for a reason – Norwich is the only place in the UK (of which I am aware from extensive research and engagement with the sector, I deeply with to be wrong about this) that has successfully aligned a strategy to upgrade energy infrastructure and establish processes to manage and deliver green energy in its parks to power events. As such they are the closest aligned locality that can offer insights and learnings from installing physical assets that enable and enforce behavioural change.

A conceptual deconstruction of this blog post in pie chart form

Probably the biggest challenge that will be faced in Liverpool will be designing a distributive governance model to achieve change that can also be shared and scaled across the UK. Looking at the multi-mode challenges of trenching across parkland, coordinating between DNOs/parks teams, managing phased installations and integrating maintenance costs into annual budgets - if anyone knows the solution it will be the marvellous Mark Denbigh, one of the best things Norwich has ever produced.

Perhaps Easter hols will be a good time to do this work. I reckon this much thinking will require a lot of energy in the form of egg-shaped chocolate treats.