Local authorities make a wide range of decisions that shape how places grow and how communities thrive, often working across complex systems and competing priorities. To support this, Natural England and partners have developed Explore: a practical framework that brings together evidence, tools and facilitation resources to help local authorities plan more effectively for health, wellbeing, nature and sustainability. In this blog, Tim Sunderland explains how Explore works and how you can get involved.
Tim Sunderland, Principal Specialist in Economic Innovation.
For the past four years, I have been working with colleagues across Natural England, partner agencies and councils to develop something I’m really excited about. It’s called Explore and it’s a framework to support local authority decision-making. Today it’s available to everyone.
Explore Toolkit Introduction - Local Partnerships
Planning how a place develops - where homes go, how green space is used, how to improve the health of a community – is complex. Joining up across departments, processes and targets is also difficult. But effective delivery requires shared vision and integrated planning. Explore is designed to support these.
The best route to a shared vision is to focus on the outcomes that all staff are working towards. Explore supports this by focusing on Health, Wellbeing, Nature and Sustainability. These are the outcomes from almost all local authority activity, but they are not always considered together early enough or explicitly enough in corporate planning. Doing so helps people to see the bigger picture and provides a common set of targets to allow truly strategic inter-departmental planning.
Explore offers four components:
- Data dashboards present high-level indicators for health and wellbeing, nature and sustainability at local authority level. They provide a snapshot of current performance across the four outcomes.
- Factor maps show what influences these outcomes, and how they relate to each other, helping build shared understanding across disciplines.
- Horizon-scanning cards prompt discussion about future risks and opportunities.
- A facilitation package contains guides and templates to support hands-on Explore workshops (held either in-person or online). During these sessions, user groups engage with plausible future scenarios, designing and testing potential interventions and plans.
Explore has been developed by Natural England in conjunction with local authority pilots and other partner organisations. The local authority pilots were Surrey, Norfolk and Liverpool Combined Authority. The partner organisations included the Environment Agency, UK Health Security Agency and the University of Exeter. Natural England’s new strategy shifts us to an approach driven by partnerships and collaboration. Explore supports this by facilitating place-based partnership working, which includes nature recovery and wider government missions.
Local authority pilots during Explore’s development have given us confidence that it meets local authority needs. Pilot workshops covered local plan development, healthy place-making, land management for nature, green infrastructure planning and land use strategies. Those creating new spatial plans could use it to ensure they drew on the widest possible evidence base, including Local Nature Recovery Strategies. Other potential uses include new towns, Nature Towns and Cities, economic development and transport plans.
At Nottingham City Council we ran an Explore workshop at the beginning of the new Local Plan process. Karen Shaw, Head of Planning and Strategy said afterwards:
“I think that the format of the workshop, and the tools, lent themselves excellently to exploring the content of the future Local Plan. I did not expect the depth of discussions that we had and also the connections that participants were making.”
Explore has its origins in my career history. About twenty years ago I worked with a group of ex-industrial local authorities seeking funding to drive regeneration. Whilst impressed with what we got done, I was frustrated at how difficult it was to join up the agendas across different departments, and how often major concerns such as health, well-being, nature and sustainability were not explicitly considered until late in the planning process.
Since joining Natural England in 2010, I have been working with colleagues to get the value of nature included in decision-making. This has included a review of the benefits of investment in nature (Defra have done a more recent and comprehensive version), a natural capital strategy for North Devon, a natural capital account of the National Nature Reserves, and a State of Natural Capital Report, amongst other things.
With this experience, I’m convinced that the problem is not lack of evidence about the value of nature, but finding ways to offer that evidence which connect to decision-making processes. Explore is part of making that connection. Developing Explore has been a huge undertaking, daunting, tiring and fun in equal measure. It’s been a privilege to work with a large range of brilliant people in local government, national government and academia. The public launch is not the end of this journey, merely the next stage and an opportunity to work with new people. Please have a look and see how you can join in!
You can access Explore for free through the Local Partnerships website here Explore Toolkit Introduction - Local Partnerships. Paid for facilitation support is also available from Local Partnerships if you need it. If you have any questions, please contact me on this address: HWNSTool-Project@naturalengland.org.uk
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