Current Articles

This article introduces the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing For Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’. This collection of articles showcases an international body of research and participatory approaches supporting diverse communities through digital and board games, role play, and co-production. It interrogates techno-centric net-zero strategies that risk widening equity gaps and explores inclusive ways to empower communities in climate action. The purpose of the collection is to advance understanding of how net zero can be achieved alongside sustainable development, recognising that climate action must be embedded within broader goals of equity, well-being, and ecological integrity. While there is no inherent contradiction between net zero and sustainability, this collection acknowledges that significant trade-offs and challenges remain. Poorly coordinated or inadequately designed net-zero policies risk deepening social inequalities; by contrast, integrated and fair approaches can transform net zero into a catalyst for broader sustainability gains. The articles demonstrate how locally rooted, creative engagement fosters trust, builds ownership, and produces contextually relevant, enduring solutions informed by communities of users who need to sustain changes in use of energy and natural resources across time. They show that initiatives developed by non-experts—or those that actively engage non-experts—can play a vital role in achieving net zero in an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable way forward that considers social and environmental aspects hand in hand. Originating from the 2nd Sustainability Multidisciplinary Meetup, supported by the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network, this collection of Early Career Researcher (ECR) essays offers practical pathways for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners committed to addressing climate change through collaboration, creativity, and climate justice.

Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level (Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration of 1992). Public participation is essential to sustainable development and good governance. Access to environmental information, empowered by legislation, involves citizens in decision-making. Legislation on public participation for the protection of the environment plays a crucial role in ensuring that communities, stakeholders, and individuals have a say in environmental decision-making processes to achieve net-zero goals. Translating legal frameworks into community engagement remains challenging. Using The Green Planet AR Experience as a case study, this research applies a community engagement model to assess the role of augmented reality in encouraging participation. The findings suggest that embodied multisensory engagement enables participants to become co-creators of environmental experiences, potentially deepening their brand connections. This research demonstrates how immersive technologies can inform environmental governance through community co-creation. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Climate justice recognises climate change as a global chain of cause and effect in which those most affected are often not those responsible for, or benefiting from, its drivers. Meaningful involvement of citizens and diverse stakeholders is therefore critical for assessing the socio-environmental impacts of development interventions that may impede justice, as well as identifying vulnerabilities. This article presents the development of a multi-stakeholder climate justice game based on dilemma-focused case studies, designed to build sustainability impact assessment skills within community settings. While emphasising the educational value of the game and its pilot application in postgraduate education, the paper also highlights persistent gaps in translating learning into policymaking and decision-making. It outlines key elements of game design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and approaches to assessing socio-ecological risks. By integrating the Sustainable Development Goals and adopting a value-pluralistic lens, the game broadens participation and evidence use, demonstrating its potential for democratic deliberation and advancing just transition debates. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

The ‘just transition’ to net zero emphasises that climate action benefits are shared widely, including amongst those potentially disadvantaged. Sustainable home retrofit requires a collaborative approach that integrates community expertise, prioritises passive design complemented by appropriate technologies, and balances building, energy, and residents’ needs. This requires engaging communities and forming partnerships between professionals and communities. We report findings from a co-designed creative community engagement workshop by the London Research and Policy Partnership (LRaPP) and Retrofit Action for Tomorrow (RAFT) in 2023. LRaPP and RAFT members co-designed and facilitated inclusive creative participatory methods, to engage diverse communities to attend. Forty participants discussed the use of home retrofit to navigate the ‘just transition’ to net zero, addressing ‘real-world’ complexities. This workshop brought together different individuals to cross research–policy–practice boundaries and collectively generate co-produced priorities and solutions to tackle how retrofit could be used to navigate the ‘just transition’ to net zero. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Project CHANGE (Curating a Human-centred Approach for net zero: Gamifying Energy-behaviour) investigates how gamification can support public engagement in domestic energy retrofit and encourage sustainable behaviours. It introduces a prototype strategy-based simulation game that enables players to explore retrofit options, behavioural choices, and co-benefits within a risk-free, interactive environment. The paper outlines the development of the game, including its theoretical foundations, systems-based design, and user-centred methodology. The architecture integrates dynamic simulations [such as weather, NPC (non-player character) behaviour, and financial modelling] to illustrate how everyday decisions influence energy use and well-being. Initial findings from internal testing and a small-scale public trial indicate that gamified experiences can improve understanding of retrofit processes and increase perceived agency over household energy use. The paper also reflects on usability challenges, accessibility considerations, and constraints arising from limited resources and sample size. Overall, Project CHANGE demonstrates the potential of serious games as part of a broader toolkit for supporting systemic sustainability education and behaviour change. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Delivering sustainable and affordable housing for low-income communities remains a major challenge amid housing shortages, energy insecurity, and net-zero transition pressures. In South Africa, adoption of net-zero housing is limited by regulatory, financial, and social barriers, highlighting the need for stronger policy integration and technological innovation. This study develops a community-driven, scalable net-zero housing model integrating Community-Based Participatory Research with innovative construction techniques. Africa’s first net-zero affordable housing prototype, the Sustainable Innovative Affordable House (SIAH-NZ), was implemented to demonstrate real-world feasibility. Performance assessments show a 97 per cent reduction in operational carbon emissions, an 82 per cent reduction in life-cycle costs, and a three-day construction period using prefabricated monolithic panels. Post-occupancy surveys indicate strong community acceptance, with 90 per cent of participants willing to adopt net-zero housing if financial support is available. The study highlights policy pathways for scaling net-zero housing through regulatory reform, financial incentives, decentralised renewables, and localised decision-making, offering a replicable blueprint for equitable, climate-resilient housing. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

This work presents the development of an educational ecology-focused card game created in collaboration with a grass-roots community group. Employing a participatory action research (PAR) methodology, the group gathered and analysed data on public attitudes towards climate change and card games to inform the design of the game. Key findings revealed a general awareness of environmental change but a limited understanding of its causes. Additionally, the public expressed a positive attitude towards both card games and education through this medium. Building upon these insights, the group designed a card game that explores climate change and pollution threats to a marine ecosystem. The PAR approach was found to be effective in designing a card game through community-led dissemination of results and decision-making. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

From the British Academy’s 2026 event series The Age of Self?, former Archbishop of Canterbury and theologian Lord Rowan Williams FBA discusses the books, writers and ideas that have shaped his intellectual and spiritual life, in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Ritula Shah. Their discussion ranges across childhood reading, theology, poetry, translation, spirituality, social justice and solidarity, reflecting on the relationship between literature, religion and contemporary society.

What kind of ‘higher education’ is suitable for our age of polycrisis—accelerating climate change, economic turbulence, and global authoritarianism? Can universities unshackle themselves from the chains of financialisation, managerialism, and technocracy? Can care, imagination, collectivity, and autonomy be taught and learnt? In this conversation, Dr Michael Hrebeniak—founder of the New School of the Anthropocene—talks about his experiment in ‘counter-nihilism’. NSotA was founded as a ‘micro-university’ with a curriculum dedicated to addressing biopolitical emergency, climate justice, and the entanglements of a more-than-human assembly through the Arts and Humanities. Here, students and teachers collaborate and self-organise to acquire the skills necessary to be citizen-custodians of our planet.

This article reports key findings from a pilot project to design, develop, and test an intervention aimed at increasing perceived organisational support among television freelancers. The initiative is a response to a problem rooted in this sector’s model of employment: the television industry has become dependent upon a skilled but contingent workforce who report feeling unsupported and isolated in a work environment characterised by instability and insecurity. The article draws from organisational support theory and explores the utility of the concept of perceived organisational support in its application to contingent workers. The intervention (Supportive Offboarding) was designed to signal support by the inclusion of four key components: the offer of feedback from the company; the request for feedback to the company; a career-related conversation; and the expression of gratitude. Each of these aspects of the intervention is tested, its outcomes analysed, and its implications assessed.

While the transnational and translational ramifications of art song have started to attract attention in recent years, there is little critical understanding of the unique modalities in which multilingualism expresses itself in the genre. In this context, this article has a two-fold aim. Firstly, drawing upon scholarship both on art song and Multilingualism Studies, I map out what I call the linguistic regime of art song, defined by the multilingual competences expected of individuals active in the art song ecosystem (singers, composers, translators, coaches, audiences) and the hegemony of certain languages over others. Secondly, on the basis of an empirical experiment involving practice-led research in singing, I consider how engagement with songs in lesser represented languages might be encouraged, and how such engagement might help expand and/or challenge some aspects of the linguistic regime of art song.

The Editors introduce the second issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.