Monthly archive for April 2014
Showing results 6 - 10 of 21 for the month of April, 2014.
25 Apr 2014
Here is the second of my monthly pieces for the Guardian’s Live Better Challenge:
When Gail Jackson put an invitation through every door on her street in St Albans, inviting her neighbours round to her house to discuss doing Transition Streets, she didn’t really expect any of them to come. “I ended up with 11 people crammed into my front room. I didn’t know what to do with so many people,” she recalls. She showed them a two-minute video about this community-level green initiative, and asked if they would like to try it on the street. Everyone put their names down. “When do we start?” they said.
The government’s flagship Green Deal has proven a flop, with 150,000 assessments turning into less than 1,000 people actually taking up the offer of a loan for energy-efficiency measures. “A more effective Green Deal rollout would have started from the bottom rather than the top,”commented Andrew Dobson, professor of politics at Keele University. That informal, tea-fuelled get-together in Gill’s front room offers a powerful taste of what a genuine national push for energy conservation might look like.
Transition Streets began in Totnes in Devon, after the town was selected as one of 10 low-carbon communities by the Department of Energy and Climate Change in late 2010. It went on to win the prestigious 2011 Ashden award for behaviour change. Neighbours get together on their streets, meet seven times in each other’s homes, work through an information pack, and take practical steps to reduce their energy, water use, travel and so on.
In Totnes, around 550 households have taken part, in 63 groups. Each household has, on average, reduced its carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes, saving around £570 a year on household bills. Over half of those involved were on low incomes. Yet a detailed evaluation of its impact found that the key benefit that people identified was feeling more connected to their neighbours. Many had so much fun they went on to set up other projects, such as a community cinema. Greg Barker, minister for energy and climate change, visited the town and enthused about Transition Streets, saying “community engagement and personal engagement are clearly the key”.
From Totnes, Transition Streets has spread. It is happening in Wiltshire, Dorset, Herefordshire and Berkshire. It is being rolled out by local government in Brittany. In Australia, Transition Newcastle’s Transition Streets Challenge was recognised in the New South Wales Sustainable City awards. In January this year, Suffolk Coastal district council announced it would be funding Transition Streets locally. This week the Belgian lottery funded a substantial rollout of it there. It was also mentioned as best practice in the government’s recent Community Energy Strategy.
Ten Transition Streets groups ran in St Albans in 2013, and the plan is to do the same this year, to engage another 200 people. Its first year was funded by Big Lottery, and this year by the Co-operative and local councillors. St Albans is also the first place to be running Transition Streets in a school, the local Sir John Laws School.
From Jackson’s experience, why does she think it works? “I love the community aspect,” she says. “I love working with neighbours to get results. People loved meeting in each others’ houses. It provided a focus in order for us to get together and it built relationships that continue”.
On a street, most people have the same kind of houses, and therefore the same challenges in terms of insulation, the same recycling challenges, the same sized gardens, the same immediate neighbourhood issues. A more top-down approach is unlikely to produce such shared interests.
What impact has Transition Streets had in St Albans? An evaluation conducted at the end of the first year found that, among other things, participants had carried out insulation and other energy-efficiency measures, installed double glazing, reduced shower times, recycled more, and started growing food, cycling and walking more. Participants saved around £380 a year and 0.8 tonnes of CO2. One participant said: “It helps you have a sense of wellbeing and community, and helps you appreciate the street a bit more.
Can anyone do it? According to Jackson, all you need is “a small group and a small bit of funding”. The small amount needed fits neatly with the starter level of grant support offered by Awards for All, which has enabled many Transition Streets initiatives to get started.
Could the government decide to roll it out nationally? Its power though comes from the fact that it is genuinely bottom-up and led by the communities themselves. “It would be a bit scary to think of government getting their hands on it,” Jackson says. “It’s a solid, old-style community engagement technique, and as a way of meeting government aims it’s perfect. But it needs to come from a community base”.
Find out more about Transition Streets here.
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25 Apr 2014
“And God said, “Let there be light” and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected…”
Spike Milligan
We hope to do better…. We have created the West Solent Solar Co-operative to generate renewable energy for, and by, the local community. The solar farm we are building will generate enough electricity for about 600 local households. It will produce in the region of 2.5 GWh each year and cost about £2.5 million to build. It will save Hampshire approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
The project started with an idea about a year ago. A search for a suitable site in the area identified a 12.65 acre field in Lower Pennington, Near Lymington and about half a mile from the sea, opposite the Isle of Wight. It has been recently restored after a decade of use, initially for gravel extraction and then for burying construction waste. A board member has purchased the field and leased it to the West Solent Solar Co-op for 25 years, with an option to extend it for another 10 years.
Six members of the board of West Solent Solar Co-op live in the New Forest area. There is a strong Transition influence with five directors being New Forest Transition members. There is significant Quaker input too. Between them, the directors have a broad range of skills and experience, including engineering, planning, new business creation, sustainability (including working for the London 2012 sustainability team), business management, film-making and legal. All these have been put to good use.
There were no objections to our application for planning permission and we received lots of support from many local people, including New Forest Transition, Friends of the Earth, and Quaker and other like-minded networks. We received planning permission in early December 2013.
Early in the project we applied to our electricity network operator, Scottish & Southern Energy for a budget estimate for the grid connection. We applied for 2.7MWp and were offered 2.0MWp. We discovered by talking to other solar farms that the convention is to install 20% additional capacity and cap the output at the grid connection limit. This we have done and we are installing 2.4MWp of solar panels.
The RooFit team at Ofgem were incredibly helpful and we managed to obtain pre-accreditation on the 31st December 2013. This means that the Feed in Tariff rate that prevailed then is reserved for us for 6 months, avoiding the real risk that the FiT rate falls while the project develops. We therefore need to build the solar farm and connect to the grid by the 30th June 2014.
To help raise the necessary funds to build the solar farm, we are working with Energy4All, a not-for-profit company based in Barrow-in-Furness who have raised similar sums of money for eight wind co-ops. We are their first solar project.
We financed the early part of the project with our own resources and despite applying to funds such as the Rural Communities Renewable Energy Fund we discovered that the New Forest is considered to be urban and we did not qualify! Energy4All has a linked fund, Energy Prospects, which lent us the money to secure the grid connection. We have since repaid this loan.
In February 2014, we offered the 50 initial members of our co-op the opportunity to invest under the Government’s Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS). The limit for this scheme is a total of £150k and happily we were oversubscribed.
The main fund raising effort began on March 18th with the objective of raising £2.46 million, including c.10% from a five-year community bond. We set a minimum investment level of £1.3 million shares and £160k of bonds to build a 1.2MWp solar plant. If we did not raise this we would return all the money subscribed. We were delighted to pass the minimum investment level on April 15th and total funds passed the £2 million mark just after the Easter break.
We have been fortunate in many respects. For example, the BBC picked up the story, and published it on their website. This was followed by a television interview on the BBC South Today local news programme and an outside broadcast interview on BBC Radio Solent. These interviews were incredibly helpful in raising local awareness of our project and stimulated a significant and immediate increase in the number of visits to our website.
We have chosen Solarcentury to build the solar farm and they will start work on May 8th and connect to the grid by June 28th, two days ahead of our FiT deadline. Scottish & Southern Energy has already built their sub-station.
We have started to implement our planting programme with volunteers from the local community planting almost 1,000 hedgerow trees provided by the Woodland Trust. The hedge will eventually go right round the site providing a valuable wildlife corridor. We will plant a wild flower meadow right around the perimeter of the panels and also between the panels. We will place beehives on the site and probably arrange for sheep to graze the site in the autumn.
The Met Office map (right) shows that we are located in an area of the UK, which receives the greatest annual hours of sunlight, and therefore an ideal location for a solar farm.
This project is the result of the local community working together. More information can be found on our website www.westsolentsolar.coop or by phoning us on 0845 373 3612.
Anthony Woolhouse, Chairman, with Jonathan Blease, Kate Chapman and Cathy Cook, all New Forest Transition members and Directors of the West Solent Solar Cooperative.
Update just before we posted this piece:
“Could you add a small note to our story that today we reached our fundraising goal of £2.46 million and have therefore ended our share drive and closed the books for new share applications. Very exciting! We will start construction in the coming weeks, so that we have can have everything installed and up and running by the end of June.
Congratulations from everyone at Transition Network…
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24 Apr 2014
Katrina Brown is a Professor of Social Sciences based at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at Exeter University. The three key themes her research centres on are Resilience, Vulnerability and Development, Dynamics of Change in Coastal Social Ecological-Systems and People, Poverty and Carbon. As someone who has published papers about community resilience, I was interested, in the context of this month’s theme, in her thoughts on impact, resilience, and how we might measure it.
So, Kate,you’re in a lift and you’ve got three floors to explain what resilience is. What’s your resilience ‘elevator pitch’?
Resilience is about the capacity of a system to be able to respond to change. That might be an ecological system, it might be a social ecological system. The way in which I understand resilience is applied to a social ecological system, so to an integrated system. Resilience covers not only the ability to be able to persist and to bounce back after even extreme events or sudden shocks, but it’s also the ability to learn from and respond and bounce back better, to positively develop in response to a whole range of different changes, some of which might be slow onset changes, background drivers, large-scale drivers, but within the context of a range of different changes.
You note in a recent paper that there is a sharp increase in interest in resilience among social scientists. Why is that? What does resilience add to previous debates do you think?
I think that resilience is helpful because it enables us to look more holistically at systems, integrated social ecological systems, and it enables us to consider the impacts of a range of different types of changes, and to consider those in conditions where the future is highly uncertain. It’s part of this consciousness of living in uncertain and risky times, and I think that resilience is a very helpful concept for understanding change and our societal and environmental responses to change within that context.
Does resilience deepen or undermine the concept of sustainable development?
It can probably do either. For me, I find resilience a very useful concept in thinking about sustainability. It contributes towards my reflections and understanding of sustainability because I think that it puts change within this broader context of thinking about sustainable development, about progress or whatever. It’s a really helpful underpinning concept that can contribute towards an understanding of sustainability.
You write in one of the papers that you sent that “resilience centralises climate change as the defining feature of local government and governance.” But are we also seeing resilience, do you think, being used increasingly as a tool by climate sceptics? After the floods the term resilience seems increasingly being used as a way to reinforce business as usual rather than to question it.
Certainly that’s a finding from my own research as well. I think resilience as a concept can be used and applied in many different ways. We saw similar things with sustainable development. There is this aspect of resilience which is used in a very conservative way. It’s used or interpreted as means of staying the same, of resisting change. There is that aspect to resilience which is about actually resisting change. There is this very different tension to resisting ideas around resilience which for me, as an academic, make it all the more interesting.
But it means that as a concept it is very widely adopted and applied in a whole range of different settings and by a whole range of different people from social movements like the Transition movement to state agencies when we’re talking to responses to flooding and building resilience. So yes, resilience is used in many different contexts and in many different ways by lots of different people.
This month we’re looking at impact and measurement for Transition. You wrote that “there has been a shift away from the notion that the central concepts of adaptive capacity, resilience and wellbeing can be objectively measured by a set of quantifiable indicators to a much more nuanced view that understands them as comprising subjective relational as well as objective aspects.” What do you mean by that and what are your thoughts on how Transition initiatives can measure whether their work is or isn’t making their community more resilient?
There’s always a tendency to try and reduce these concepts like vulnerability, adaptive capacity and resilience to a set of straightforward objective measurable indicators. But actually a lot of the literature and a lot of the research shows that there’s a whole set of subjective dimensions to resilience or vulnerability. So actually how a person feels about their own capacity and their own abilities, their own efficacy, which are hugely important in determining how they might be able to respond, and that also translates to a community scale as well and to a collective scale. We always should be looking across the objective and the subjective aspects in trying to assess how resilient a community or how resilient a society or a system might be.
I suppose some things like Transition would be coming at resilience from a mitigation perspective, seeing resilience as a tool for mitigation whereas it’s all too increasingly seen as an adaptation tool. How do you see that balance between mitigation and adaptation in terms of climate and resilience?
Both are extremely important and I think that resilience applies just as well to thinking about how we build capacity to adapt as to how we build capacity to mitigate. The way that we think of resilience as a concept applies to both. If we start looking at resilience as a much more proactive capacity, to be able to self organise, to learn and to actually develop in a more sustainable way then it becomes a really key concept in thinking about mitigation.
I wonder from your perspective, as somebody who studies the field of community resilience, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition and the way that it interprets and works with the idea of resilience has had over the last 7 or 8 years?
I can’t talk that specifically about the Transition movement as it’s not my area of expertise, but from what I know about the Transition movement, in terms of some of these core capacities that you might think of as having been developed, around the capacity to self-organise, around building social capital in different ways, this idea about doing stuff together which builds a whole set of capacities at a community scale, I think those are really important.
How that then feeds into building competencies around community action, around building these sort of reflexive and problem solving skills that might happen as a result of doing stuff together. And then I suppose building a set of capacities which are about co-creating collectively a vision of the future and setting that within a context of a political strategy would be the things that I would have thought would be really important and the kinds of areas where you could identify impact within the Transition movement.
You’ve written about how mainstream resilience thinking often places the emphasis on individual responsibility for coping, that actually the lack of resilience is somehow your inability to cope and seeing it in the context of how we contribute to economic success rather than social wellbeing. You talk about shifting the emphasis from positive adaptation despite adversity to positive adaptation to adversity. What’s your sense of that in terms of the social justice aspects and inclusion aspects around resilience?
This is an area that’s really starting to come to the fore in debates around resilience. It’s an area which, from the academic and scientific perspective is only just starting to be integrated and there’s a lot of debate around how do we understand the dynamics within resilience, for example.
When we start looking beyond these individual capacities and thinking about resilience as something that is vested, a characteristic of an individual to actually this much more dynamic view of collective and community resilience, then all of these issues to do with whose resilience, whose voice, who defines resilience, who defines these visions for the future become incredibly important. Then of course we come back to real core social science ideas, as you say around social justice, around inclusion, participation and so on.
My own background is in international development and I think there’s really important research and track record of findings from international development which has looked at these issues which we have to now start integrating into our understanding of resilience. It’s an under-researched area but of course it’s an area of paramount importance.
In one of your papers you ask the question “how much adversity should resilient individuals endure before social arrangements rather than individuals are targeted for intervention?” What are your thoughts on that?
There are two aspects to that. The first is an issue that you alluded to in an earlier question, which is this idea that resilience can be used in this very conservative sense and in a way it can be used to say – well individuals are very resilient, and it can be seen as part of the retreat of the state and responsibility for supporting individuals and communities after particular events. There’s that sort of danger and there’s quite a lot of writing in the community psychology literature which talks about the dangers that are inherent in resilience thinking in that respect.
But secondly, there’s again this tension between how we understand the role of structural elements in supporting resilience, either in individuals or communities compared to the individual’s characteristics. It’s that debate about structure in agency really which is part of an ongoing discussion within the social sciences which is how can resilience be supported and enhanced through external infrastructure, external interventions, compared to how much is it built through individuals’ capacities. So I think that there’s an important tension and discussion around that. How much is resilience the responsibility of governments or other agencies, compared to how much does it have to come from within communities and individuals?
You mentioned earlier on about how one of the aspects of resilience is about learning and the ability to learn and reflect in that way. What’s your sense of, as somebody who works in higher education, of what our education system designed to produce people with the best skills for resilience would look like? Does it look like it looks like today or what would our education system look like if it produced individuals and professionals who were a resilient and grounded in resilience as they could be?
That’s a hugely challenging question. One of the key issues for me as somebody who works in the university system is how we get our students engaged with the real world and engaged with the communities within which they live and the communities within which our universities exist. It’s something that our institute in Cornwall, the Environment and Sustainability Institute is trying really hard to do, is to form much more meaningful partnerships in a whole range of stakeholders in the community in which we exist, so that our research can actually speak more directly to the needs of stakeholders.
Our students can work alongside and in partnership with our stakeholders within the community. I think that’s extremely important. It’s important in terms of how our research can actually address real-life issues, it’s important in terms of how we understand ourselves not only as educators but as citizens and I think that it’s also incredibly important for enhancing the experience that our students get out of their studies.
The important thing for me is to think about resilience as this multi-dimensional concept which is used by many different people which has opportunities within it, and which can be used, as the Transition movement is using it, in this radical and very dynamic sense as opposed to the conservative, the staying the same, the persisting sense in which it’s very often applied more popularly.
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23 Apr 2014
Here’s something we’d love your help with. How can we capture the impact of Transition in numbers? We’ve done our best with what we can find, and we’d love to know what you would add from your local initiative. Any numbers you can put to your impact? Number of meetings? Amount of funding? Amount raised in a share option? Number of carrots grown on a train station? It’s over to you. Let us know (use the comments box below), and we’ll publish the final version at the end of the month…
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The Impact of Transition in numbers
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Number of countries with active TIs
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44
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Number of Transition initiatives registered with Transition Network
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1,130
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Number of initiatives in Japan registered with Transition Network
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5
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Number of initiatives in Japan registered on national Japanese Transition site
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40
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Percentage of those involved in Transition who are women
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58% 4
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Subscribers to the Transition Network newsletter in March 2014
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17,929
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Subscribers to the Transition Network newsletter in January 2011
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9,309
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Number of people who have done Transition Training in the UK and US
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3,637
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Percentage of those still active in Transition 4 years after doing Transition Training
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86%
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Number of UK pupils who have been involved in Transition Network’s Schools in Transition pilot
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Over 3,700
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Percentage of Bristol Mayor George Ferguson’s salary paid in Bristol Pounds
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100%
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Number of members of the EU’s Economic & Social Committee who spent a day with their local Transition initiative
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19 (all of them)
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Percentage of TIs considering themselves “very” or “fairly successful”
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75.7% 1
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Number of times ‘Transition’ appears in UK government’s ‘Community Energy Strategy’ (2014)
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10
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Number of Transition Trainers in the world
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137 in 25 countries
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Number of initiatives in Brazil registered with Transition Network
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4
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Number of initiatives in Brazil registered on national Brazilian Transition site
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61
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Number of people involved in the average successful TI
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189.5 1
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Transition Network’s Twitter followers
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13,500
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Percentage of TIs that are legally constituted
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64% 1
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Theme most frequently tackled by TIs
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Food 1
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Amount raised through share launch by Transition Bath/Corsham’s community energy company (Bath & West Community Energy)
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£750,000
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Amount West Solent Solar Co-op (set up by New Forest Transition) is seeking to raise through shares for a community solar farm
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£2,200,000
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Average percentage of TI core group members who’ve done Transition Training
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3 1
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Turnover of 20 highly replicable Transition-oriented enterprises identified by the REconomy Project
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£3.5m
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Number of people they employ between them
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109
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Number of national Transition hubs formulating a strategy to support REconomy type activity in their country
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7
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Outside temperature that didn’t put off 100 people from attending the first ever Latvian REconomy event
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20 below
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Percentage of TIs who think they are “not good at diversity”
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55.9% 1
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Number of initiatives in Sweden registered with Transition Network
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7
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Number of initiatives in Sweden registered on national Swedish Transition site
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192
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Amount of CO2 saved per household by Transition Streets participants in Totnes
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1.2 tonnes 5
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Number of households in the town that took part
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550 5
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Amount of Google returns for the term ‘Transition Town’ (although some will also be people who live in towns and are undergoing gender realignment)
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75,800,000
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Number of times 2013 Guardian article about Transition was shared through social media
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Over 10,000
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Number of weeks The Power of Just Doing Stuff was No 1. In the Guardian Bookstores best sellers list
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2
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Number of times In Transition 2.0 was viewed on YouTube in its first 6 weeks there
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26,000 6
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Number of page views on TransitionNetwork.org during 12 months up to March 2013.
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1,182,360
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Number of downloads for Transition Network’s 3 recent Economic Evaluation reports
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4,922
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Percentage of people for whom Transition is their first experience of activism
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32% 2
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Number of States in the US where Transition is active
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37
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Number of languages in which In Transition 2.0 is subtitled.
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22 6
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Number of UK local currency schemes inspired through Transition
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6
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Bank of England’s estimate of amount of local currencies in circulation in the UK
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£385,000
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And their estimate of the amount of Sterling in circulation
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£54.2 billion
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Percentage of TIs that are city-based
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27.5% 3
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Percentage of TIs engaged in projects around food and growing
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40% 4
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Number of initiatives in New Zealand registered with Transition Network
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11
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Number of initiatives in New Zealand registered on national Transition site
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70
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Number of Transition initiatives set up by local councils.
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0 4
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Percentage of TIs reporting “attracting wider interest” as their biggest obstacle
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76%
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Percentage of TIs who have begun ‘building a bridge to local government’
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83% 4
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Numbers of people estimated to read each edition of Transition Free Press
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30-40,000
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Number of people attending a Transition Training in Nagymágocs, a central-south Hungarian village.
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8 (should have been more but “most of the participants chose to go to a pig slaughter instead”.
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References
1: Feola G., R J Nunes (2013) Failure and Success of Transition Initiatives: a study of the international replication of the Transition Movement, Research Note 4. Walker Institute for Climate System Research, University of Reading, August 2013
2: Seyfang, G. (2009d) Transition Norwich: a fine city in Transition. Report of the 2009 Membership survey. University of East Anglia.
3: Haxeltine, A., Seyfang, G. (2009) Transitions for the People: theory and practice of ‘Transition’ and ‘Resilience’ in the UK’s Transition movement. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Working Paper 134.
4: Seyfang, G., Haxeltine, A. (2012) Growing grassroots innovations: exploring the role of community-based initiatives in governing sustainable energy transitions. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2012, volume 30, pages 381 – 400
5: Beetham, H. (2011) Social Impacts of Transition Together SITT: Investigating the social impacts, benefits and sustainability of the Transition Together/Transition Streets initiative in Totnes. Research report, Transition Streets, (June 2011).
6: In Transition 2.0 is online at https://youtu.be/FFQFBmq7X84
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22 Apr 2014
At this year’s Political Studies Association International Conference in Manchester, Andrea Felicetti of the University of Canberra presented a paper called Radicals without rebellion? A Case Study on four Transition experiments. In it he explored “whether and how social movements can promote radical positions whilst refraining from adopting an oppositional approach”. This was one of the first pieces of research I have come across that explored Transition’s approach to politics, so we contacted Andrea and asked him to write an article for us, presenting his key findings in as accessible a way as possible. We are delighted that he agreed to do so.
“After having met so many wonderful people engaged in Transition it is a real pleasure for me to have the opportunity to share here some of my work. My study focused on four Transitions, two in Italian towns in Emilia Romagna and Sicily and two from Australia in a suburb of Brisbane and in Tasmania. I did not have the goal to assess how good these groups are at doing Transition. Rather, I tried to understand them from a very specific perspective: a democratic point of view.
Being interested in deliberative democracy I see democracy not just in terms of, say, electoral competition or representation of interests but particularly in the quality of communication occurring within and among groups in societies. So, I tried to understand the internal qualities of these groups and their way of relating to the local politics.
There are many reasons for researching a movement like the Transition from a deliberative democratic perspective. To begin with Transition is an important phenomenon of itself. Also, understanding contemporary forms of citizens’ engagement is of sure interest to many contemporary scholars of democracy. For instance, in making communities more resilient and localised there is ground to make them more democratic too. The non-adversarial approach of Transition is especially fascinating to deliberative democrats who for long time have been showing some important limitations with traditional adversarial politics.
The Transition is also especially interesting because although it has a do-it-yourself approach it also stresses the importance of quality communication among participants with local actors. Finally, many of the themes that are central to the Transition (for instance, climate change) are also fundamental for many deliberative scholars around the world.
I spent almost two months in each local community, participated in group activities and meetings, and interviewed Transition participants and other community actors. There is a great variation in terms of groups’ characteristics from a deliberative democratic standpoint. Whilst in some groups discussions had a lesser role, some case studies developed discursive processes that showed desirable characteristics from a deliberative standpoint and had a fundamental role in coordinating the various activities.
The internal features of a group and the relationship that it establishes with the surrounding context both seem very important to determine its deliberative and democratic qualities. When there is a firm commitment to democratic norms and when it is perceived that communication at group level is important to affect the community, groups are capable of developing high quality interactions. My findings, along with similar ones on other contemporary movements, challenge the view that the public is incapable of quality democratic engagement.
The good news in terms of the impact you are having is that Transition initiatives can actually promote democratic forms of engagement at the local scale. On the other hand though, there is no ground to claim that this is always the case. Groups establish original relationships with their surrounding environment and forms of engagement that is neither particularly deliberative nor democratic may prevail. This seems more likely to happen where the focus on ‘getting things done’ clearly prevails over other concerns (whilst more active groups are not necessarily those with a more pragmatic approach).
With regard to this latter aspect for instance it is worth noticing that often deliberative and democratic characteristics are not required in collaborating with local institutions. Actually, managing the relationship with local institutions puts under particular stress a group’s capability to develop democratic engagement. In line with other studies my work suggests that an environment where institutions are particularly responsive to citizens’ activism is not necessarily beneficial to the development of democratic interactions within groups and with the broader community.
My findings of course cannot speak for the Transition initiatives all over the world or the Network. However, even just in my study it seems that Transition means quite different things to different people. In the face of specific challenges participants have to make decisions on how to interpret Transition’s ideas. These choices not just affected the democratic qualities of groups but also their overall activity. Interestingly, those groups that tend to adhere closely the Transition guidelines have a good platform to build good quality and democratic interactions.
Although I have no recipe to develop deliberative democratic engagement in groups I think a few essential ingredients may include the following:
- Don’t take the democratic nature of a group for granted. It is usually possible to interact democratically in groups but it does require effort.
- Good quality discussions won’t happen naturally and having some form of moderation may have incredibly good effects.
- Create moments for the group to decide how much it cares about good quality communication and how it intends to achieve it. Good quality communication is not necessarily about talking a lot but as much as making sure that there is always an open channel for effective discussion.
- Being open won’t make you inclusive. Openness to different people and views won’t necessarily attract those people and views… an effort is needed in order to reach out to locals and take good care of them when they do show up. NB: having good quality communication implies that you are better able to ‘exploit’ the different contributions that people may give.
- Help from institutions may greatly enhance your Transition but very different views and goals exist quite naturally among various actors. If you decide to partner with institutions (or any organisation really) make sure participants are happy with it (and with the ways collaboration is carried out along the way).
Quite normally some people tend take responsibility for different tasks. Some may talk to politicians, some may run activities, and some may contact other organisations… Make sure that someone takes care of nourishing engagement among actual people within the group and in the rest of the community.
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