This research wants to explore the diversity of (trans)local transformative initiatives and how they can synergistically generate broad societal change towards sustainability and democracy. I want to seize doable alternatives to deal with existing institutional barriers and social impasses and explore possible approaches and instruments for ‘governing’ transition. I want to address the research gap related to sensible ways of governing the later phase of transitions in a context of rapid and profound change. The research question is therefore: “What would be an applicable and comprehensive governance instrument to support the development of (trans)local transitions, facing the challenge of tipping point times?”. I adopted transdisciplinary participatory action research and focused on developing spaces where renewal can be nurtured in the context of reorganization (in the resilience sense). This approach is expected to lead to new agreements and actions. Still, it is primarily designed to facilitate multi-stakeholder learning processes and open the floor for the emergence of new shared meanings. I assumed that the complexity of the sustainability challenge demands for collaboration between different actors, namely local governments and community-led initiatives. Existing research revealed that many tensions and obstacles to partnership still persist, and results are far from meaningful, while providing insights on how to overcome these challenges. I summarized the state of the art in a Compass for Transformative Collaborations. The research process was based in two projects nested in the Transition movement, namely the Municipalities in Transition and the Dive Deep & Dream Big. The Transition movement is one of the most significant examples of local communities leading the way to a post‐carbon society. The movement is spread world‐wide and demonstrates a distinctive openness for collaborations, providing therefore, an experimental space with transformational ambition. Both these action research projects were supported by the University of Lisbon, anchored by its role within ECOLISE (European Network for Community‐Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability), with the broad participation of other organizations. I played the role of an embedded researcher, fully partaking as an observer and participant, contributing actively and reflectively to the codesign and facilitation. The Municipalities in Transition project started in 2017 and aimed at exploring how municipalities and civil society could work better together. The research included codesigning a systemic and operational instrument that could boost the transformative reach of cooperation between local actors of sustainability and testing in six pilots in five countries. Local actors can use this instrument together to capture the governance imprint of transformational efforts and are challenged to reorganize and expand it, improving the stock of change actions and related experiences. Quite drastic changes occurred in all the six communities that tested the governance instrument. These changes were the product of the reflexive experimentation, the new social relations, the empowerment process, the changing tensions, the translocal connectivity, the discourse formation, the new (or reinforced) institutional homes and the strategic actions. New ways of doing, organising, framing and/or knowing, as expressed in the theory of Transformative Social Innovation, used as analytical framework. The Dive Deep & Dream Big project started in 2019 and was set as a collaborative inquiry to support break-through change at the municipal scale. Individuals and organizations working in different contexts got together to share knowledge and develop new transition pathways. Creating a social learning environment gave visibility to barriers that prevented effective action by fractally reproducing patterns of polarization. There was an agreement on the building blocks of a new integral governance framework based on reconciliation and imagination. These two action research projects provided complementary information, opening the floor to a holistic approach to transition. As an answer to my research question, I present a structured and replicable transformative governance approach that involves connecting the support of change makers, the welcoming of trauma, and the exercise of creativity, together with the acceleration of systemic collaboration. It can be used as a heuristic in the design of (trans)local regenerative interventions, able to catalyse and support ambitious and inclusive systemic change at the local scale and act as a leverage point for wider societal transformation.

The Dutch Research Institute For Transitions

Transition Network

KR Foundation