From Net‑Zero Promises to Practical Progress – Built in Sweden, Ready for Cities Everywhere
The Actionable Consensus Framework is a practical framework for city leaders to turn municipal climate ambitions into tangible, shared results. The real issue in city hall is seldom a lack of knowledge or processes; it is internal friction that makes the municipal machinery grind to a halt on some issues, most notably: climate-related action.
ACF is built to work at two levels at once: for individual changemakers inside City Hall and for the city organisation as a whole.
If you are one motivated official with a single stuck issue, you can pick up ACF and use it yourself. The framework is flat‑packed: you get a clear playbook, story templates, and step‑by‑step scripts that you assemble locally, inside your own context. No new mandate, no consultants, no extra budget line. Just a few hours of preparation, two focused hours with the right people in the room – and a concrete action list at the end.
If you are part of a leadership team, you can use the same flat‑packed design to scale ACF across the organisation. The method becomes a shared way of working: the same scripts, the same science‑based story templates, the same two‑hour structure – repeated across departments and programmes until it turns into a city‑wide habit.
In both cases, ACF is deliberately low‑cost and low‑threshold. It is designed to plug into the processes you already have, using the people you already employ, under the constraints you already live with. Instead of paying external experts to run a new process for you, your own staff run a simple, proven method that helps them turn ambition into action – issue by issue, team by team, city by city.
A flat‑packed, evidence‑based method that any motivated official – and any city – can use to move from ambition to action.
The Actionable Consensus Framework (ACF) is a free, practical method that helps both individual officials and city leaders see what blocks the path from ambition to action – and agree on how to get unstuck. It gives municipalities a structured way to turn climate ambition into concrete decisions that improve quality of life and strengthen the local economy, grounded in insights from climate science, behavioural research, negotiation theory, and the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD).
Developed in Sweden, ACF grew out of several years of hands‑on work in city halls. Per Grankvist created the framework through action research in close collaboration with ten Swedish cities, all part of a government‑financed national programme for urban climate neutrality. Drawing on fields such as behavioural science, social identity theory, and urban governance, ACF translates what we know about how people actually make decisions into a method that fits the everyday reality of City Hall.
Its core theses have been reviewed and endorsed by leading scholars in sustainability science, strategic sustainable development, and urban governance, ensuring that the framework rests on a scientifically robust foundation rather than on local intuition alone. The purpose was clear: to speed up the transition by reducing the internal friction that slows or stalls important decisions – whether that friction shows up in a single stuck case or across whole departments.
From the beginning, ACF was designed to be used in real meetings, by real practitioners, under real political and organisational constraints. Its structure reflects lessons from facilitation research and consensus‑building practice: one motivated civil servant can use it to move a specific issue forward; a leadership team can adopt the same method as a shared way of working across the city organisation. By combining scientifically robust, FSSD‑aligned story templates and structured backcasting with a deep respect for human relationships, ACF helps groups reach agreements that are both emotionally credible and institutionally durable.
Interest in ACF has been unusually high, both in Sweden and internationally – a strong signal that the need for this kind of evidence‑informed tool is real and urgent. To meet that demand and make the framework available far beyond the original pilot cities, ACF is now stewarded by an independent, non‑profit foundation.
The Actionable Consensus Foundation maintains and develops the framework, keeps it freely available, and works with leading scholars in urban sustainability and governance to ensure it remains aligned with current research and FSSD principles. At the same time, it supports a growing community of city practitioners around the world who are ready to move from ambition to action together – starting with one issue, one team, or one city at a time.