Shaping policy through creativity: Insights from Gothenburg

When the WATERFRONTS consortium gathered in Gothenburg this October, on the last day, Götaland Engineering hosted two back-to-back sessions that shaped the policy and advocacy backbone of the project. Unlike traditional policy labs, these workshops brought artists, engineers, policymakers, and community practitioners into the same room, not to debate, but to imagine.

Our approach was simple: start from lived experience, surface anxieties, and then build strategies for change. As one participant said early in the session, “You can feel like you’re crazy caring about climate change.” The workshop created space for that feeling to be acknowledged, translated, and ultimately transformed.

Policy workshop: From concerns to commitments

We began by creating policy-maker personas for small hand crafted zines; imagined officials whose priorities, blind spots, and anxieties echoed real ones. We then captured themes like food waste, lack of transparency, local produce politics, and uneven municipal systems. One participant summed up the challenge bluntly: “Every municipality has a different system, trust comes by foot and leaves by horse.”

The policy drafts developed that day centered on:

• improving clarity and accessibility of local environmental information

• supporting circular food systems

• strengthening cross-country sharing of effective strategies

• integrating eco-anxiety into local climate policies as a recognised public need

  
  

Advocacy workshop: From statements to stories

Immediately after, the room shifted from policy logic to advocacy voice, capturing urgency, humor, and vulnerability. The resulting pieces became visual arguments for care, transparency, and community leadership.

One idea surfaced again and again throughout the morning:

“Small, manageable steps — coordinated with community — are what help us ground ourselves.”

The advocacy statements echoed this spirit, emphasising:

• that people don’t need “a vision or a cause” to be welcomed into climate action

• that creative spaces help steady eco-anxious communities

• that listening with genuine interest is itself a political act

Our takeaway

For Götaland Engineering, Gothenburg was where our role as policy lead came fully into focus. The workshops allowed us to see how quickly communities move from anxiety to agency when given the right tools. It reshaped our understanding of what “policy work” can be in an arts-driven project; less about producing a document, more about building processes where people feel safe enough to speak honestly.

And from that honesty came our clearest insight:

Policy begins where people speak openly about what hurts, and advocacy begins when those words find form.