Empowering local authorities to accelerate the clean energy transition: the Local GoGreen project

Local and regional authorities are a decisive lever for the European Union (EU) to achieve the 2030 climate and energy targets and to advance towards the European Green Deal goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Small municipalities are lagging behind in the transition to a clean energy environment and suffer from a lack of knowledge, motivation and resources (human, organisational and financial) to help achieve these goals. The LOCAL GoGREEN project aims to build a replicable methodology to promote a clean energy transition (CET) of small municipalities through capacity building, participatory decision-making and collaborative actions. Six municipalities in six EU countries are used as pilot cases on which to test the proposed methods to support the implementation of CET. These pilot municipalities will also form the basis for extending the experience, lessons learnt and good practices to a group of neighbouring municipalities in order to increase the impacts of the project. This will be supported by a transnational knowledge acquisition, analysis, sharing and capitalisation system that will provide technical guidance and support for building sustainable energy communities. The study presents the methodological approach pursued by LOCAL GoGREEN and the first results obtained in the first year of activity, in particular in terms of local working groups and self-assessment reports carried out by the pilot municipalities.