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In cities around the world, ambitious air quality action is possible when it reflects how people live, work, and move.
Community engagement makes this happen by bringing residents into the policies and programmes that affect their lives. It helps cities design and implement them more effectively and sustain action over time.
Through grassroots and city-driven community engagement, Breathe Cities is supporting cities around the world to put communities at the heart of air quality action.
This resource builds on these efforts, drawing together existing resources and experience. Through case studies from Bangkok to Bogotá, Sofia to Johannesburg, it shows how different forms of engagement are applied in practice, from anchoring policies in local realities, to building support for citywide action.
When done well, engagement results in policies and programmes that respond to people’s needs. It gives communities the data and information they need to make informed choices and shape action, builds trust and buy-in, improves how problems are understood, captures what can be missed by technical data, and connects clean air action to wider issues and opportunities that matter for sustained change.
While engagement must be tailored to each context, cities do not need to start from scratch. They can build on tested approaches that already work.
