Community engagement in the Transition movement: views and practices in Portuguese initiatives

ABSTRACT

As the need to address climate change is ever more urgent, many have emphasised the importance of community-level responses. The Transition movement has advanced community-based action to increase resilience for over a decade and has expanded significantly. Thus, it is a critical setting for examining community engagement towards climate change in practice. Our study is based on 39 interviews with facilitators of Transition initiatives in Portugal, coupled with observational data, and is guided by two main research questions: how do Transition initiatives promote community engagement at the local level? What are the factors constraining or facilitating community engagement within Portuguese Transition initiatives? We identify several aspects of Transition’s constructions of community resilience and engagement that indicate ambivalence towards, or avoidance of, certain issues. They relate do agency, structure, power and inclusion, as well as to the modes of engagement and the communication practices of Transition initiatives. We argue that strategies for community engagement should be specific to social contexts rather than internationally uniform and be based on participatory approaches. Drawing on an extensive empirical analysis, the article contributes to theory building on the Transition movement beyond the Anglo-Saxon context and to the wider field of community-based environment initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Transition
• community engagement
• Portuguese initiatives

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants in this study for their time and for sharing their accounts of the Transition movement and community engagement with us. We would also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Maria Fernandes-Jesus http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-1968

Anabela Carvalho http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7727-4187

Lúcia Fernandes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0822-3685

Sofia Bento http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2267-7376

Notes

1. A previous study in the U.K., based on the Totnes initiative, suggested that success in engaging the local community was at least partly due to the already-firm ecological mindset of local citizens, and a strong culture of participation in local issues, together with the existence of a local network before the creation of the initiative (Connors and McDonald 2011).

2. Other analysts place the movement under the umbrella of prefigurative politics (Mason and Whitehead 2012, Hardt 2013, Biddau et al. 2016, Power 2016) in the sense that it encourages the use of “practical and prefigurative” methods to “build alternatives in the present and to bring about social change in the future” (Hardt 2013, p. 22).

3. It must be noted, however, that based on a longitudinal case study in the U.K., Dilley (2017) recently found that it was a short period of politicisation that rendered the Transition group most ineffective.

Additional information

Funding

This study was developed within project COMPOLIS: Communication and Political Engagement with Environmental Issues, supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) [grant number EXPL/IVC-COM/1717/2012] through national funds (PIDDAC) and co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) through COMPETE – Operational Program Competitive Factors (POFC). Lúcia Fernandes is recipient of a posdoctoral fellowship (SFRH/BPD/79933/2011) supported by Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (Portugal).