Sociology and Social Policy colleagues awarded funding to foster collaboration
Professor Mark Davis and Dr Katy Wright have been awarded faculty funding for respective research projects.
As the University of Leeds brings together the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Environment, a new grant has been announced to support ten Social Science led projects. The funding is designed to encourage cross-faculty collaboration and open new areas of research.
Two of the successful projects are led by colleagues in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, cementing the School’s leading role in interdisciplinary research tackling pressing social and environmental challenges.
Readying the Retrofit Policy Lab
Professor Mark Davis (School of Sociology and Social Policy) has been awarded funding for Readying the Retrofit Policy Lab, a collaborative project with Professor Lucie Middlemiss and Dr Anne Owen (both School of Earth and Environment).
The project responds to the UK Government’s Warm Homes Plan (WHP), billed as the largest ever public investment in upgrading British homes. While the plan represents a major opportunity, research by the team suggests the WHP’s current policy and delivery model risks leaving many households behind.
The ‘Missing Middle’
The Retrofit Policy Lab was set up by the team to enhance the impact of their previous research on retrofit. Collaborating with Lighthouse Policy Design and combined authority partners in Yorkshire, the team has identified a ‘missing middle’: households who are not eligible for low-income grants, and so will struggle to meet the financial and time commitments needed to act on retrofit themselves. To make the WHP a success, a retrofit intervention must deliver what people need, not just what buildings require.
Retrofit requires planning and emotional energy to decide which trades and technologies to trust; this can feel risky and too much hassle. This means that planning to scale retrofit by focusing narrowly on just getting the finance right for consumers is not going to work without real and meaningful help at every stage of the customer journey.
The Retrofit Policy Lab represents an opportunity to drive a major policy shift: moving away from one-size-fits-all to a suite of targeted, precision solutions shaped by user-centred insights to design a series of meaningful customer journeys for different people in different life contexts.
Being awarded the pump‑priming funding will help to prepare and position the Retrofit Policy Lab for a major funding application and impact by helping civic partners to deliver retrofit itself.
We believe this shift will drive higher uptake, more equitable outcomes and deliver stronger value for money for government.
Evaluation of the Million Trees Initiative: An interdisciplinary scoping project
Dr Katy Wright (School of Sociology and Social Policy) has also secured funding as the Project Lead for an interdisciplinary scoping study of the Million Trees Initiative, working with Dr David Williams (School of Earth and Environment).
Developed in collaboration with Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council (CMBC) in West Yorkshire, the interdisciplinary scoping project will draw on the Council’s extensive holdings of data related to their Million Trees Initiative (MTI), a large-scale afforestation project, carried out in the 1990s.
Bringing together expertise in Sociology, Social Policy and Environmental Science, the project will examine the social and environmental outcomes of the MTI, and will explore how the afforestation project was conceived, planned and implemented.
With tree planting now central to climate and nature recovery strategies, the findings will help improve understanding of the wider outcomes of afforestation and support Calderdale’s future nature recovery planning, while also advancing new interdisciplinary approaches to environmental research.
The pump priming funding will give the team the time and resources to carry out an initial analysis of CMBC’s existing data, build collaborative methods across social and environmental sciences and shape a larger programme of research. We aim for this project to support the future development of more integrated approaches to afforestation and climate action.
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