Short Abstract

Creative, place-based and participatory evaluation results from the Risky Cities project show how arts-led climate engagement can shift behavioural intent, inform UK policy, and challenge narrow quantitative evaluation models through lived experience and transformative learning.

Description

This paper draws together findings from the UK Climate Resilience Programme’s Risky Cities: Living with Water in an Uncertain Future Climate project and recent national policy work to demonstrate how participatory and arts-led research and evaluation can drive climate resilience, stimulate community learning, and reshape governmental approaches to public engagement. Using evidence from large-scale community arts interventions such as FloodLights (Hull, 2021), programmed activity at COP26 developed with the National Youth Theatre (NYT), and engagement in a range of policy-facing outputs, this paper offers a critical and practice-grounded reflection of how qualitative evaluation can make a difference (or not) in fast-emerging fields of climate action, arts engagement, and public participation.

Risky Cities used mixed-method, iterative, and participatory research and evaluation approaches to understand how creative, place-based interventions motivate long-term climate action. FloodLights, a large-scale public arts event in Hull held 2021, engaged an audience of approximately 11,000 with robust evaluation showing strong cognitive and emotional impacts: audiences reported deeper place attachment, heightened concern about flooding and climate change, and increased intention to change behaviour. These findings demonstrate the potential impact of historically informed, meaningfully place-based arts practices in provoking public engagement and action, challenging conventional evaluation frameworks that prioritise quantitative outputs over lived experience or cultural meaning. Yet this success was not without challenge – within a largely quantitative UKRI-funded programme changing minds about the (in)validity and importance of people’s emotional experience took resource beyond the funded lifetime of the project but ultimately led to recognition of the legitimacy of our approaches.

The NYT’s On the Edge performance at COP26 extended this participatory approach to national and global stages, illuminating how creative co-production with young people surfaces complex emotional landscapes, from frustration and anger to pride and hope. Evaluation using journals, vlogs, audience responses and post-performance reflections showed how authentic youth voices disrupt adult-dominated climate discourse, highlighting the limits of existing policy structures to absorb lived expertise.

These insights directly informed contributions to UK parliamentary processes, including written evidence to DCMS, EFRA and Environmental Audit Committees inquiries, and invited expert testimony on creative climate engagement. Within the British Academy and DESNEZ’s public participation on net zero strategy work, our research allowed us to provide guidance on evaluating public engagement using SHAPE-informed frameworks, emphasising that effective monitoring requires more than metrics: it requires mechanisms for learning, iteration, cultural readiness and the capturing of subjective experiences.

Drawing these strands together, the paper argues for a shift in the pipeline between research, evaluation and policy that recognises the specific needs – time, relationship-building, reflexivity – that creative, participatory and place-based methods require. We propose that these methods, and the evaluation arising therefrom provide essential tools for understanding climate action and community resilience—especially when addressing entrenched inequalities, historically-situated risks, and the emotional dimensions of climate change. This work contributes a new perspective on evaluation’s policy impacts that advocates for transformative learning, and positions lived experience and co-creation as critical evidence for climate policy and practice.