Greater Manchester Carbon Neutral Missions

What is the context for the GMCA's missions programme?

Greater Manchester is made up of ten local authorities in the Northwest of England. Following the Conservative Party’s 2010 election promise to devolve power to local and regional councils in England, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) became the first cityregional combined authority to strike a deal in 2012.

Though GMCA does not have many of the policy tools used by national governments, or local authorities for that matter, including carbon taxes or levies on plastic bags, it has gained access to new policy making and political capabilities to support action in a number of important sectors, including transport, health and business. As such, GMCA used a variety of ‘roles’ (see Figure 1) to direct innovation and tilt the socio-economic playing field towards its bold mission.

In 2017, Andy Burnham became Greater Manchester’s first elected mayor. This placed him in a position of leadership in relation to GMCA and sparked a renewed sense of purpose around what the city-region could accomplish. Policymakers began to prioritise how GMCA could determine a more ambitious carbon neutrality target than existed, initiated through top-down leadership, but to be shaped through bottom-up public debate. In early 2019, GMCA declared a climate emergency and drew up a new plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2038, 12 years earlier than previously agreed. GMCA went on to commission a group of experts, including Professor Mariana Mazzucato, to evaluate the city-region’s economic competitiveness and areas of opportunity for future growth.

“In March 2019, IIPP worked closely with the authority to design and articulate a mission, namely, carbon neutral living within the Greater Manchester economy by 2038.

What was the approach to Mission-Oriented Innovation?

IIPP argues that road-mapping missions helps urban areas to support and facilitate the forms of collaborative investment and innovation activities between discrete actors required to successfully address distant targets, in uncertain contexts, such as the climate crisis. Moreover, urban areas attempting to prompt green transitions demand roadmaps to provide long-term, enduring pathways that can provide stability beyond political cycles or narrow private investment horizons.

To this end, GMCA worked closely with IIPP and other stakeholders to design a mission roadmap and detail the sectors, actors and initially hypothetical mission projects that could strengthen and sustain the region’s mission of carbon neutral living. Roadmaps such as this offer a pragmatic overview of who needs to be involved, where innovation needs to happen and what kind of innovation must be stimulated.

What solutions are emerging from the missions approach?

GMCA’s distributed governance structure — its mission is by and for stakeholders — is beginning to have an impact and this can be clearly seen in the region’s efforts around retrofitting buildings. In early 2021, GMCA led the city-region’s effort, resulting in the award of over £78 million in government funding through the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme that will support the retrofitting of over 150 public sector properties. GMCA was awarded access to this financing in large part because of the aforementioned retrofit accelerator, whose development is currently being led by one of the task and finish groups that sits in the low carbon buildings challenge group.

GMCA is also successfully taking advantage of its different roles in new, creative ways. For example, GMCA, in partnership with the local authorities and low carbon buildings challenge group, has received an additional £10 million to support residential retrofits through the Green Homes Grant Local Authority Delivery Scheme. GMCA used its position as the region’s ‘convener’ to bring a number of partners together to place a competitive bid for the government scheme

What challenges does the GMCA face?

GMCA must continue to grapple with a larger challenge, namely, its financial and policy-related dependence on the UK Government. Despite the unprecedented devolution of powers in 2012, and the creative ways GMCA has recently used its mandate as a regional authority, it must still apply to national funding schemes and rely on a national climate strategy to which the region must align. This is not expected to change anytime soon, which emphasises the need for GMCA to know what powers it has at its disposal and to take advantage of them accordingly.