One of the best ways to make policies effective and equitable is to ensure community members are involved in the policymaking process from start to finish. In a recent blog post, my colleague wrote about the significance of the California Energy Commission (CEC)’s draft statewide Building Energy Performance Strategy. This statewide strategy responds to California Senate Bill 48 of 2023 (SB48) authored by Senator Josh Becker. It reflects years of relationship-building among state officials, technical experts, and CBOs working to ensure building decarbonization policy addresses the challenges of the people most affected by the climate crisis.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
-
Since 2022, IMT has worked alongside the California Energy Commission and Senator Josh Becker’s office to help shape a statewide building performance strategy.
-
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership gave partners a shared way to track progress from consultation toward deeper collaboration.
-
Community partners are coordinating public comments ahead of the August 21 deadline and planning broader listening sessions this fall.
-
Community ownership cannot be added at the final stage of a policy. It takes long-term investment, trust, and transparency built well before decisions are settled.
-
The lasting result isn’t only the strategy report. It’s an ecosystem of partners prepared to keep shaping the policy through implementation.
Since 2022, the Institute for Market Transformation has worked with the CEC and Senator Becker’s office on the development of a statewide building performance policy. IMT worked with CBOs so they could shape how the policy addressed equity, affordability, tenant impacts, and other community concerns.
That work was part of a multi-state and multi-city equitable building decarbonization project and the subject of a paper I authored for the 2026 ACEEE Summer Study, Advancing Equitable Decarbonization Through Community Ownership.
Over the course of the project work in California, these organizations did more than attend occasional stakeholder meetings. They met regularly with CEC staff, built working relationships, and developed greater familiarity with the state’s policy process. The CEC, in turn, created space for more transparent discussion about the development of the SB 48 strategy and how it could better account for community engagement, tenant impacts, and equitable implementation.
The Framework
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership provided a shared framework for these conversations. Partners used it repeatedly to assess the quality of engagement, identify the seat of decision-making power, and discuss what it would take to move from consultation toward deeper collaboration. That consistency helped make engagement more concrete. Rather than relying on broad commitments to equity, the group could ask practical questions: What information and resources do community partners need to participate meaningfully? How will their recommendations be reflected in the final strategy?
Developed by Rosa González of Facilitating Power in partnership with Movement Strategy Center · it is the keystone of IMT’s community engagement approach.
Consult
The community is asked for feedback on a plan that has already been drafted. Input is gathered, but the community isn’t yet shaping the plan from the start.
The results of this work go beyond the strategy report; they are in the relationships that will endure beyond the document, and in the new power dynamics of policymaking centered on frontline communities. Because community partners have remained in close communication with the CEC, they understand the policy’s current stage and the points at which intervention is still possible. They are now coordinating with affordable housing providers and other community partners to submit comments ahead of the August 21 priority deadline, and organizing broader listening sessions in the fall.
Those efforts are more likely to succeed because the groundwork has already been laid. Community partners are not encountering the policy for the first time at the end of the process. They have context, relationships with agency staff, and a clearer understanding of the choices that remain open. The CEC also has trusted partners who can help translate a highly technical policy into questions rooted in residents’ experiences with housing costs, building conditions, extreme heat, indoor air quality, and displacement.
The central lesson of our ACEEE paper is that community ownership cannot be added to a policy at the final stage. It requires long-term investment, repeated engagement, trust, transparency, and a willingness to share influence before decisions are settled. Interventions like the Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership can help facilitate this shift.
That investment may not always produce a single, easily measurable outcome. Its value is often visible in the quality of the process: community organizations that know when and how to intervene, agencies that are more willing to listen, and policies that anticipate consequences that technical analysis alone may miss.
California’s statewide building performance strategy is still evolving, and the draft report will be revised in response to public comments. We hope the legislature will debate and enact a future bill that expands on the report’s recommendations, followed by a regulatory process that will unfold over several years.
However, the community engagement that shaped the bill reflects the policymaking shift we support—one in which communities are not merely responding to pre-made decisions, but have their needs and priorities integrated into and informing the planning process. The California case offers a compelling example of what durable, community-driven policy development can look like.
The payoff of long-term engagement is not just a stronger report. It is an ecosystem of partners prepared to keep shaping the policy as it moves into implementation.
