Climate action increasingly depends not only on designing solutions, but on how cities and communities work together to implement them. This talk will explore how participatory approaches can help municipalities develop local climate strategies, encourage climate action, and design solutions grounded in the realities of different communities.
The first speaker, Ananya Tiwari, will share insights from European living labs, highlighting how municipalities are co-designing relevant adaptation solutions with local communities. Ananya will also share examples of tools used for citizen engagement with climate action, including citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, climate contracts, and other forms of collaborative governance. It will draw on lessons learned and challenges faced across contexts, sharing how participatory approaches can be adapted and scaled across European cities.
Daniël Hogendoorn will explore these issues from a local context, sharing how similar participatory approaches are being used in Amsterdam, and the specific opportunities and challenges the city faces in translating climate ambitions into local action.
The final talk will be given by Dagan Cohen from the Amsterdam Donut Coalition (ADC), a platform working to scale up grassroots community-led initiatives to create systemic change in Amsterdam. The ADC collaborates extensively with the municipality of Amsterdam, with the objective of embedding the principles of the donut economy within existing institutional systems. Contrasting with the previous speaker, Dagan will offer insights on the local community's experience in engaging with the municipality, and trying to influence decision-making processes.
Together, the three perspectives will connect experiences from across Europe with the realities of our own city, exploring how municipalities can collaborate with citizens to realise climate goals and scale climate solutions. Participants can engage in the discussion that follows the three flash talks.
This SDG Academy is free of charge and open to students and staff of VU Amsterdam as well as everyone interested in the topic. The event can be joined in person at the Green Office VU, or online. We will conclude the event with drinks. Please register here.
The Green Office (HG KC 18) is located in the basement of the VU main building (De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam), between the restaurant and the security desk.
Speakers
Ananya Tiwari is an interdisciplinary social science researcher, who is currently working for Alternet, a European Science-Policy Interface. This involves collaborating with scientists as well as the European Commission, European Environmental Agency, and other EU organizations to improve environmental policymaking in Europe, through EU projects like BioAgora and Co-op4CBD. She recently completed her postdoc at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and was previously pursuing her PhD in Ireland. She has worked with multiple EU funded projects, involving collaboration with researchers, policymakers, and local communities across Europe in living lab settings. This included working with 20+ municipalities across Europe, to improve citizen engagement with local climate strtaegies. Find out more on her website: www.ananyatiwari.eu.
Daniël Hogendoorn is a Senior Strategist at the City of Amsterdam (Ruimte & Duurzaamheid) and previously held a comparable role for The Hague. He works on the city's climate budget, investment frameworks, legal frameworks and planning procedures that decide whether a city's climate ambitions survive contact with its own institutions. His research background is in negotiation, multistakeholder processes and uncertainty in governance: PhD research at TU Delft on the nature of difficulty in expertise-intensive governance, with fieldwork on UK flood governance, hurricane response in Texas and the IPCC climate negotiations, and a postdoc at UCL STEaPP on how governance expertise develops around river systems in Thailand and Myanmar. He has also published on collaborative governance and conflict and in 2024–2025, he was a Policy Fellow at the UvA Institute for Advanced Study, examining the complex global city-system as key driver of the Anthropocene.
Dagan Cohen is the director of the Amsterdam Donut Coalition where he, together with the ADC team, helps Amsterdam accelerate the transition to a sustainable and socially just economy using Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model. With a background as a visual artist and having worked as creative director for international agencies, he has used his creativity as a force for good in the past ten years. He has organised design challenges and led acceleration programmes and is the founder of Changency, a creative agency for societal change. Since April 2024, he is leading the Amsterdam Donut Coalition.