There are aspirations for towns and cities to become both more ‘sustainable’ and more ‘liveable’ - from a social, economic and environmental point of view - in order to address a wide range of strategic policy concerns, from climate change through resource depletion to health and well-being issues. But those organisations – be they grassroots or institutional - which have attempted to implement measures and initiatives to support sustainability and liveability tend to find significant barriers to their mainstream application. For example, it is proving very difficult to scale up local initiatives that start off as voluntary, demonstration exercises often because of governance or legal issues. The objective of this scoping study is to identify the main generic barriers to the scaling up and transferability of initiatives for sustainable and liveable communities, with an emphasis on UK experience, and to suggest solutions to address the most common of these barriers. This paper reports on the analysis of a series of interviews with 11 leading professionals at different levels across the public, voluntary, Non-Governmental-Organisations and academic sectors in the UK. Initial results indicate that certain barriers, such as cultural barriers, seem to be more prominent than others, and that suggested solutions often involve multi-level and cross-sectorial collaboration.