Learnings from Local Collaborative Transformations: Setting a Basis for a Sustainability Framework

Abstract

The complexity of the sustainability challenge demands for collaboration between different actors, be they governments, businesses, or grassroots movements, at all levels. Nevertheless, and according to previous research, many tensions and obstacles to partnership still exist and results are far from meaningful. By investigating potential synergies, our purpose is to define a sustainability framework to promote better collaboration between community-based initiatives and local governments, in the context of transformation. Specifically, the research aim presented in this paper is to harvest learnings from existing collaborative experiments at the municipal level. As a starting point and using exploratory literature review concerning areas like policy (e.g., public administration) or business and management research, we propose a ‘Compass for Collaborative Transformation’. This heuristic device can support the study of these sustainability experiments. We also introduce a method to map the governance imprint of these collaborations and to provide a ‘proxy’ of transformative efforts. We then present and discuss results from 71 surveyed cases happening in 16 countries in America and Europe, comparing distinctive frameworks involved. Finally, we consider the preconditions of a framework to improve these local collaborations—namely the capacity to support joint navigation through transformative efforts, facing high levels of uncertainty and complexity—and present ongoing efforts to codesign a new sustainability framework.

Rethinking the sustainable development goals: Learning with and from community‐led initiatives

“…Several translocal networks exist globally each involving hundreds to thousands of local initiatives; for example, the Transition Network, the Global Ecovillage Network, national Community-Supported-Agriculture networks and their European umbrella Urgenci, various national Repair Café networks, and national and international Social and Solidarity Economy networks, among others. New forms of multi-actor local partnership include the Municipalities in Transition framework, which supports collaborations for transformative action on sustainability between Transition initiatives and local government, designed to help to navigate uncertainty and complexity and support emergent and unplanned outcomes (Macedo et al, 2020) doing so in ways that transcend, and in some ways challenge, many predominant assumptions concerning the formulation and implementation of SDGs. In particular, the proactive, prefigurative and creative nature of CLI action on the SDGs challenge conceptions of civil society as consisting of either passive stakeholders whose compliance is necessary for reasons of public acceptability, or even vehicles for delivery of centrally defined goals, targets and implementation strategies.…”

“…Historically the basis of traditional and indigenous management of natural resources in both terrestrial (SDG15) and marine settings (SDG14), commons have been created by CLIs as the basis for sustainable and socially responsible production and consumption (SDG12) in areas such as agroecology and food production (SDG2), renewable energy infrastructures (SDG7), education and learning (SDG4), cooperative enterprise (SDG8), healthcare (SDG3) and finance (SDG1, SDG10) (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019). Often initiated as local responses to climate change (SDG13) (Henfrey & Kenrick, 2017), they have through various forms of boundary commoning —partnership both among commons and with state and market actors (SDG17)—provoked multi‐level institutional change (SDG16) (Macedo et al, 2020; Wittmayer et al, 2020), resulting in new forms of sustainability‐oriented governance at both community and city scale (SDG11) (Burnett & Nunes, 2021; Russell, 2019). In some cases, CLIs have become the foundations of new regional economies and global sustainability industries (SDG9) (Lewis & Conaty, 2012; Ornetzeder & Rohracher, 2006).…”

Climate action: is coronavirus what we have been waiting for? (and now what?)

“…The Transition movement is well-positioned in the urban areas to play a constructive role in the process due to a relatively effective experience in reflecting and acting locally in the perspective of global collapse (Feola and Nunes 2014;Loorbach et al 2016). Its capacity to move across a wide political spectrum, an optimistic approach, and a focus on resilience and collaboration (McGregor and Crowther 2016;Macedo et al 2020) might favour the symbioses with (still) prevailing regime actors.…”

Assessing co-creation in strategic planning for urban energy transitions

“…While recent years have seen a proliferation of collaborative approaches to energy transitions such as co-creation and co-production, these have often been limited in scope, either focusing on collaboration between specific actors (such as municipalities and universities [5][6][7] or municipalities and local NGOs [8][9][10][11][12]) or limiting co-creation efforts to a single phase of the transition process (e.g., knowledge creation [13][14][15]). Numerous practical difficulties have also emerged, including the lack of time and incentives to participate in such projects, the lack of knowledge and skills required to facilitate co-creation, and the resulting tendency to avoid and/or obscure highly controversial issues rather than resolve them through collaborative methods [15][16][17].…”