Examples & Case-studies » Environment & Sustainability
» Environment & Sustainability

Overview

Ketso emerged from work in ecological land management in Southern Africa and engagement with community members in Manchester to develop a sustainability vision for the River Irk and a former landfill, Moston Vale.

You can find out more about this by viewing this brief video, and by reading the case study of the work in Moston Vale here.

Ketso is being used by a wide range of organisations in environmental management and sustainability planning.

A selection of case studies are shown below:

NEW! Environment Agency Workshop on Sustainability and Land Use

Lower Alt with Crossens Pumped Drainage Area Strategic Planning (2011)
Working with Richard Shirres, (Technical Specialist Flood Risk Management at the Environment Agency), Bill Tippett facilitated a Ketso workshop to develop an important strategic understanding for the pumped drainage area of the Lower Alt with Crossens catchment. This area is managed for flood risk and is intensively drained by pumping. The idea behind the workshop was to help ensure any planning for future water management addressed long-term sustainable land use issues and to inform future stakeholder engagement.

There were nineteen participants in total, with one person attending from Natural England and the remainder from the Environment Agency. Over the half-day workshop, presentations were given about the scope of previous studies and to give an overview of the key operational and strategic issues for the area. These were followed by an interactive Ketso workshop. Participants were divided into four groups, each with a main focus:

  • Improved Integration & Operation of Water Management
  • Characterising sustainable Land Use Exploitation via Ecosystem Services
  • Paving the Way for Catchment Care and Democratic Water Governance
  • Building a better Environment Agency ~ Farming relationship

Participants explored future possibilities (opportunities) and challenges (constraints) and reviewed each other’s work.  Over 220 comments/issues were raised by participants.  Following the workshop, these were distilled, collated and grouped, to yield seven themes.

The relevance of stakeholder understanding of climate change and sustainable land use for each of the distilled issues, within these seven themes, was highlighted.  This synthesis of the Ketso workshop output potentially provided important insight into the needed focus of engagement with stakeholders.

The Ketso workshop allowed participants to see the area in the context of sustainability and was an excellent opportunity to provoke useful dialogue between all of the different technical disciplines represented. Comments from participants included:
"It helped focus internal staff on the sustainability of the catchment."
"I found it really useful contribution for the Strategic Environmental Assessment."

You can download the summary report here, or see the excel spreadsheet synthesising the results, here.

National Policy Consultation: The Environment Agency

The Environment Agency

Ketso was used under contract to the Environment Agency in developing a series of workshops to discuss the River Basin Planning Strategy (which sets out how the requirements of the European Union Water Framework Directive are to be met). This work involved bringing together a broad range of stakeholders, including farmers, wildlife organisations, water companies, ports’ authorities and government agencies. In total, over 120 people attended five regional events.

Ketso proved instrumental in encouraging open discussion between participants and Environment Agency staff. It was used to both foster and record this dialogue, and to enable people to think creatively about this challenging policy (ie. implementing the EU Water Framework Directive).

Feedback from particapnts included:

  • Mapping process at start v. useful to get ideas flowing.
  • A new and complex subject…exercises with felt, etc. were most helpful.
  • Interesting approach  - active engagement of disparate sectors  ? Significant degree of commonality in thinking.
  • Discussion groups as the method of recording ideas (labels on felt) was very stimulating for the discussion.  Far better than just pen and paper. 
  • The discussion sessions were interesting and allowed ideas to flow and develop.

Environmental Planning with Manchester City Council

Green City Network

Green City Network (2006)

A team from the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology (CURE) at the University of Manchester facilitated two workshops at the Green City Network Launch Conference, held at the City of Manchester Stadium. Ketso was used to manage and record discussion of the different aspects of the Network, including existing activities and assets, as well as new ideas and future opportunities.

The discussion involved over 100 participants, working in teams of around eight people per kit. Over 1,300 new ideas were generated and prioritised. All of this information was recorded in a database and used to develop a framework and direction for the Network. Feedback from the event was very positive, with many participants citing the Ketso workshops as being among the most interesting aspects of the day. You can download the full report here.

Biodiversity Stratergy

Biodiversity Strategy (2005)

This day-long workshop for stakeholders to provide input into Manchester’s Biodiversity Strategy was hosted by Manchester City Council at the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology. 30 stakeholders from Manchester and its region attended the workshop. The use of Ketso helped to keep the discussion positive, despite several potential areas of conflict amongst the delegates. The fact that the discussion generated more useful ideas than problems is a testament to the use of Ketso as a tool for delivering positive results.

Feedback on useful aspects of the workshop included:

  • The interactive element helped to stimulate ideas and discussions.
  • Very good interactive sessions.
  • Coloured leaves a great idea.
  • The participatory element, facilitated by Joanne and Angus, provided an ideal means of encouraging discussion, coupled with a genuinely engaging and intuitive method of brainstorming and recording ideas – excellent! It was also very useful to share experiences with a diverse range of workshops participants – I strongly believe that such inter-disciplinary events are key to the future success of sustainable development.

You can download the full report here.

Note that the reports in this section used the name DesignTree for Ketso - this was an earlier name for the toolkit.

Further work with Manchester City Council has included developing a tree strategy and climate change strategy. These are discussed  below, in the work that Countryscape has been doing using Ketso.

Environmental and Landscape Planning (Countryscape)

Countryscape is a multi-disciplinary company working in the environmental, voluntary and heritage fields, which brings together a creative approach to communications and environmental and scientific know-how. Countryscape has been using Ketso in their workshops and engagement stakeholders since 2004.

Tree Stratergy

An example of this work was a one-day event designed to explore ideas for developing the Manchester City’s Tree Strategy. Countryscape were called upon by the City Council at short notice and therefore required a solution ‘out of the box’ – something that could be easily set up and used with confidence.

Approximately 100 people took part in the event, which proved highly successful in terms of both people’s satisfaction and the delivery of results (over 600 comments were recorded, roughly half of which represented new ideas to take the strategy forward).

You can see further examples of Countryscape's use of Ketso by clicking on the links below.

Paul Mahony,  the Creative Director of Countryscape has commented:
"Ketso is a fantastic tool that has greatly improved how we manage workshops, consultations and community planning events. It's brilliantly simple and even fun to use; and most importantly it produces results that are clear and can be acted upon. I would heartily recommend Ketso to anyone looking for a cost-effective and reliable solution to running participatory events."

Big Society and the Environment (North West Environment Link)

Keso was used to develop ideas of how the environmental community could best respond to the opportunities and challenges of the Big Society. On October 27, 2010, 65 people from a wide range of organisations involved in environmental issues across the North West attended a conference hosted by North West Environment Link. A report synthesising the results has been posted on the North West Environment Link (NWEL). The need for significant capacity building and skills development in partnership working was highlighted.

The full set of results is available in this spreadsheet.

You can download the report here. You can download the response to this report from Richard Benyon MP, Minister for Natural Environment and Fisheries's here.

Leeds City Council Energy Guardians

Jonathan Eyre (Sustainability officer at Leeds City Council)

Energy Guardians

Following the last Big Switch off campaign, the Environment Policy Team (EPT) at Leeds City Council decided to hold a team meeting to look at the direction

and outcomes of the Energy Guardians and to consider what should be done next.  Ketso helped bring clarity and an agreed action plan to help deliver the future Energy Guardian campaign.

Comments from Team Members included:
  • ‘ We would never have systematically looked at the width of issues around the Energy Guardians if we had not used Ketso’
  • ‘ interesting process to gather thoughts and concepts and provide structure that should hopefully result in effective action’
  • ‘It helped work though a complicated project in an organised way and pick out key objectives’
  • ‘a good concept which produced an end result that was lead to rather than developed though abstract thinking’

Download the full report here.

Sefton Coast Partnership Coastal Forum

Dominique Tilley (Sefton Coast Partnership Representative)

Context

The Sefton Coast Partnership hold a Coastal Forum every year. The event is open for anyone to register to attend, and this year just under 200 people attended.  The Planning Department of Sefton Council are currently updating and redrafting the Sefton Coast ICZM (Integrated Coastal Zone Management) Plan. We thought that the forum would be a good opportunity to consult with the public on this. After using the Ketso kit for another workshop, we thought it would be a good idea is use this technique for consultation at the Forum.

We did not hold Workshops as such, but invited people to write their comments on ‘leaves’ as to what their views were on certain aspects of the coast which could then be fed into our Plan.

What we will use the information for:

The information we obtained will be fed into the new plan, particularly the comments on the vision and the aims and objectives. The event as a whole will also be included on our ‘consultation list’.
Interestingly, the consultation (especially asking for peoples input to the vision) derived from a separate session we had with a Ketso kit, where it was raised that if the Plan we are writing is to be aimed at the public, then the public should have a say in the vision.

General Comments:

I found Ketso to be really useful in getting a wide range of views, particularly from people who may not normally wish to partake in consultation. The ‘branches’ ‘leaves’ and different colours make it more interesting and unusual, and in particular I found it extremely easy to transport, set up and pack away. I would definitely recommend Ketso to any colleague carrying out public consultation, and will certainly try to use it in any future consultation that I undertake. Thanks!

Download the full report here.

Sustainable Change Cooperative - Greater Manchester

Dr. Steve Glynn (Sustainable Change Cooperative Representative)

Rochdale

Sustainable Change Cooperative used Ketso to help a group of concerned citizens in Rochdale begin the process of thinking about what a sustainable Rochdale might look like and how to get there. Around 30 people were involved and were first asked to look forward and think about what they would like to have seen happen in Rochdale by 2020. These ideas were then put down on the felt and the groups identified various themes to cluster them around. Following this participants were asked to think about actions that would need to happen in the next couple of years in order to begin to make progress towards the vision for 2020. This was meant to be the start of a process and the end result of a collective vision and ideas of short-term actions was meant to provide some impetus to this. The participants enjoyed using Ketso and it allowed them space to come up with their own thoughts while providing an effective way of bringing these together into a collective output.  "The outline of a plan and a series of priorities were possible within a very short time and without the formalities of PowerPoint and other corporate presentation methods"  (Sustainable Change Coperative).

Oldham

As part of their work with Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council to help develop a climate change action plan, Sustainable Change Cooperative used Ketso in a workshop with various stakeholders who needed to input into the plan. The aim of the workshop was to get wider input into thinking about key actions that are needed, actions that are already underway, and the possibility of involvement of the stakeholders in making actions happen. The three groups were each presented with 4 themes to work with and were first asked to identify what they saw as key actions that needed to be delivered under those themes. These were then added to the felt and each group discussed what had been written and whether more needed to be added. The stakeholders were then asked to detail any relevant actions that they were aware of that were already going on. Everyone was then asked to suggest where their organisations could contribute towards delivering the key actions identified and what that contribution might be. The final stage was to get each group to identify 5 priority key actions. Using Ketso allowed for a wide range of opinions and inputs to be gathered in the limited time available and ensure that there was a real opportunity to influence what needs to be a plan that is adopted by everyone.