ACCESS began working with Dr Jaya Gajparia in 2024 after she raised concerns with the Leadership Team (Golding et al. (2024), Gajparia (2025)).  

These concerns closely aligned with themes emerging from ACCESS’s own evaluation evidence and reinforced the need for deeper reflection and action. 

What we did  

To strengthen the project’s approach to representation and inclusion, Dr Jaya Gajparia has been working closely with The ACCESS Leadership Team, notably Leadership College Lead Professor Saffron O’Neill, ACCESS EDI Lead Professor Kate Burningham, and ACCESS Director Professor Patrick Devine-Wright.  

This work has been prioritised across the project with the ACCESS Guiding Principles team, Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellows, and Operations Team supporting the interventions. 

Patrick Devine-Wright and Jaya Gajparia worked together in the months leading up to the ACCESS Assembly 2025 to inform who was invited to speak and attend that event, benefiting from Jaya Gajparia’s networks. Through targeted outreach and relationship‑building beyond existing ACCESS networks, a number of global majority experts new to ACCESS were invited to attend the 2025 Assembly. The evaluation for the ACCESS Assembly 2025 showed that this input was positive, but could go further.  

Building on this learning and action, the ACCESS leadership established ACAI in January 2026. The aim is enable deeper, sustained and accountable progress on diversity and inclusion.  

This action included employing Jaya Gajparia as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and tasking her to set up the group, aiming to move ACCESS from identifying gaps to closing them through sustained practice.  

ACAI supports the final phase of the ACCESS project by embedding intersectional perspectives in how ACCESS convenes, whose expertise is platformed, and how its convening power is used – directly addressing concerns about representation raised through earlier Assembly evaluations and amplifying diverse expert voices across ACCESS events. 

ACAI is also supporting our work to make the ACCESS Network more inclusive. The ACCESS Network is a publicly available, searchable database of social scientists and experts working in the fields of climate and environment.  

As set out by ACCESS Director Patrick Devine-Wright:

“The social sciences are for everyone, and if our contributions are to be viewed as legitimate by society, we must pay serious attention to fairness, inclusion and diversity. ACAI extends the Guiding Principles approach that we have created in ACCESS, and arises from our own reflections on who is in the room at ACCESS events, and who is not. ACAI is helping us to broaden the range of voices who speak and attend, and by carefully evaluating this intervention, we aim to produce rigorous new evidence that can inform future work in this area across social science and environment sectors.“

ACAI is a collective of seven environmental social science experts (see below) from a range of backgrounds, including research, government and policy work, campaigning, and grassroots activism. Together, they bring different perspectives but share a common commitment to social and environmental justice. 

ACAI pays close attention to who has power, whose voices are listened to, and who is often excluded from decision making about climate and environmental issues. They recognise that these decisions do not affect everyone equally. 

The collective takes an intersectional approach, meaning they understand that people’s experiences of environmental harm and climate change are shaped by overlapping factors such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. These factors interact with each other and with place, often creating deeper inequalities for some communities. 

ACAI also works from a decolonial and feminist perspective which means challenging long‑standing systems and ways of working that come from colonial histories or that prioritise certain groups over others. Instead, ACAI values different ways of knowing, and places care, fairness, and justice at the centre of their work. 

Guided by a social justice lens, ACAI is supporting thoughtful engagement with intersectional perspectives and creating space for diverse and marginalised expert voices to be heard across ACCESS events and networks 

1. Support a more inclusive and diverse Annual Assembly in June 2026 and final ACCESS event in London in November 2026  
2. Establish new relationships between ACAI members, ACCESS and diverse communities across academia, policy and funding 
3. Offer insight, learning and support for the development of similar advisory mechanisms elsewhere 

ACAI will embody and advance all three ACCESS Guiding Principles in its work: 

• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 

• Environmental Sustainability 

• Knowledge Co‑production 

We want ACAI’s impact to reach beyond ACCESS and support real, systemic change across environmental social science and the environment sector more broadly. To this end, we hope that other projects and research centres and funders will learn from and be inspired to take up similar work.   

However, we acknowledge that this is an experiment, and we do not yet know if it will be successful.  

We will be sharing written outputs and honest evaluations of ACAI’s work and its impact towards the end of 2026, so do look out for these.