(Local-) community for global challenges: carbon conversations, transition towns and governmental elisions

Abstract

This article addresses the narrowing interpretation of community when governmentalised: that of community's elision with local. First it surveys five broad academic and policy interpretations of the community implied in low carbon transitions. These demonstrate the persistence of community's broad and open-ended polysemy today. Second it looks more closely at the role community plays in UK environmental governance today, including specific evidence from two such government-funded community initiatives used to meet global environmental challenges: Transition Towns and Carbon Conversations. Third it provides a critique of community governance-beyond-the-state. It argues that community used to “jump scales” in response to global challenges like climate change, is often at its most narrow: local and governmentalised. Doing so helps contextualise the governmentalisation of (local-) community in UK environmental governance. Often it is localised in order to delegate (perceived) agency and responsibility onto individual actors at a local level.

Keywords:

• community
• transition
• localism
• transition towns
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

I must thank a number of people for looking over and providing advice on improving the text, and for discussing the ideas explored here: Harriet Bulkeley, Sara Fuller, Joe Painter, Anna Schreuer, and Amanda Taylor Aiken; and for Stewart Barr, Patrick Devine-Wright and Joseph Murphy, at whose session at the RGS-IBG this paper was presented, for your encouragement to develop these ideas into a publication. Both reviewers were helpful and encouraging in different ways. Thank you. The responsibility for the faults and arguments here, of course, remains my own. The PhD research upon which this article was based was conducted as part of the ESRC Climate Change Fellowship, “Urban Transitions: climate change, global cities and the transformation of socio-technical networks” (Award Number: RES-066-27-0002), led by Harriet Bulkeley.

Notes

1 “Words have meanings. Some words, however, also have a feel” (Bauman 2001, p. 1).

2 Not necessarily the Temporary Autonomous Zone's Bey describes, but any group with a desire to have a temporary existence.

3 Transition with a capital, as a noun, refers to the Transition Town Movement. Not to be confused with transition as a verb and theoretical concept.

4 Available from: http://www.planlocal.org.uk [Accessed 17 November 2013].

5 Climate Change (Scotland) Bill (Ex) (E), Received Royal Assent, 4 August 2009.

6 CCF website: http://ccf.keepscotlandbeautiful.org/ [Accessed 17 November 2013].

7 These six topics are: “looking for a low-carbon future”, “energy in the home”, “travel and transport”, “food and water”, “consumption and waste”, and “moving on”.

8 Available from: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/ [Accessed 17 November 2013].

9 Available from: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative [Accessed 17 November 2013].