I’m down in Bristol for a couple of days to deliver a senior management/director sustainability workshop for one of our long-standing clients. I worked in this City for a couple of months about 20 years ago (gulp) but this is my first proper visit since then – I’ve only used it as a staging point in the meantime. The big news here, of course, is that the City won the European Green Capital for 2015.

I’m quite jealous as, with my Councillor hat on, I helped steer my adopted city, Newcastle upon Tyne, to the top of the now-defunct Sustainable Cities Index run by Forum for the Future in 2009 and 2010 – beating Bristol and other cities with a green reputation such as Brighton. We had been sizing up a Green Capital bid just before the electorate consigned me to the opposition benches and I spent an enjoyable couple of days in Stockholm learning from other interested cities across Europe and gauging the competition. The incoming Council administration submitted a bid and fell well short, having pooh-poohed my advice that we would need to up our game to compete. It took Bristol three attempts to get it, so I wasn’t wrong.

What I found from the Sustainable Cities experience is that these really high profile awards are surprisingly good at creating forward momentum. The old cliché “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan” was all too true – all sorts of people came out of the woodwork to claim credit through what were sometimes tenuous links, but we let them join the celebrations without getting arsey about it and used it to get them to actually do something.

Bristol is taking an similarly inclusive approach, asking organisations to sign a pledge in order to take part. The pledge isn’t that onerous, which is a good thing – a high bar would simply lead most to sit back and do nothing. Once you get them engaged, you can use the momentum of participation to encourage them forward.

But the key success factor in sustainability is the same as it is in any organisation, country or community – leadership. Newcastle topped the Sustainable Cities Index because of the leadership of my colleague and cabinet member Cllr Wendy Taylor. After the change in political control, sustainability was dropped from the Council’s priority list and the City’s reputation has faded. In Bristol, Mayor and architect George Ferguson has put his reputation on the line to win the European Capital status and he and his red trousers have been at the forefront of the bid.

Leadership makes all the difference. That’s what I’m working on for our client. In the meantime, I’ll take a wander around the City and see if I can spot the poo-bus.