Introduction

The Transition Handbook uses the Second World War to illustrate the huge capacity humans have to mobilize when faced with a major threat (Hopkins, 2008). However, climate change has not yet provoked such a reaction.

Transition Towns (TTs) are a community-based response to the challenges of peak oil, resource scarcity, and the need to build local resilience to climate change. The TT movement began in 2006 in Totnes, Devon, and subsequently has grown to 353 TTs across the UK and 898 internationally.Footnote 1

TTs did not grow directly out of UK government policy and yet the TT movement fits the mould of the ‘Big Society’,Footnote 2 where communities are encouraged to mobilize to address local issues. Below, we assess whether the Coalition government's decentralization policies could forward TTs' objectives. We analyze TTs' successes and the challenges they face under intensified cuts in public spending, against theories of environmental citizenship.

We wanted to determine the key challenges of participation in the green economy, and how local and central government can play a role in promoting community action through formal political channels. Our research found that some TTs have struggled to engage with their local authorities. The existence of participatory policies is insufficient: communities need to develop their capacities to engage in policy-making processes. Our paper explores innovative ways of funding community initiatives by publicly indexing local sustainability initiatives, and considers how indexing could work in practice.

Methodology

We undertook a desk-based review of literature on green citizenship and supplemented our findings with extensive primary research, including interviews with TT members, environmental campaigners, political party candidates, policymakers, academics, NGO and think tank staff in the UK. Though we refer to some respondents’ job titles, we have not cited participants’ names directly.

Theories of participation and green citizenship

In this section, we assess the values that underpin modern citizenship to determine how citizenship could foster local sustainability. We examine the role of social capital in community organization and empowerment, and how local decision-making might be strengthened through access to equitable, transparent and formalized mechanisms.

Many commentators have pointed to a crisis of citizenship in modern democratic states, with democracies becoming ‘hollowed out’ (Goetz and Gaventa, 2001; Ginsborg, 2008). Trachtenberg focuses on the:

… vast scale of modern states [which] makes meaningful participation in self-governance impossible … with its bewildering assortment of options for political engagement (Trachtenberg, 2010: 344).

For its part, ‘environmental citizenship’ can take different forms. Weber has written about ‘Grassroots Environmental Management’ (GREM), which includes community-based initiatives that foster social capital by establishing local partnerships and a shared vision of community priorities (Weber, 2003).

Social capital plays a fundamental role in making communities feel capable and motivated to participate, encouraging others to do the same (Putnam, 1993).

One council officer told us that distrust among UK citizens that government will act on climate change might explain the rise of community responses, such as TTs. However, it is often easier for better-off communities to engage in environmental initiatives, because they are more likely than poorer neighbourhoods to own established and accessible assets, and often have the ability to mobilize these assets to meet their needs (Kelly and Caputo, 2005: 235).

Furthermore, social capital cannot grow in infertile soil. In communities with high levels of crime borne out of economic underdevelopment, there is often a significant degree of mistrust that hampers cooperation and opportunities for mutual development (NEF, 2000; Phillips, 2002; Kay, 2005: 167).

Our findings suggest that efforts should be made to engage the most marginalized groups and foster a sense of collective ownership of community action on sustainability.

The localist campaigning organization LocalWorks has warned that people often view ‘consultation’ as ‘a sham, where decisions are made in advance and people's views ignored’ (Localworks, 2011: 8). One interviewee argued that ‘mediocre engagement is worse than no engagement’, while another suggested that ‘people need to see the value of their inputs’, as well as linked outputs: failing to provide meaningful engagement often means that ‘innovative people get discouraged when people don’t listen to what they have to say’.

The design of participatory processes should therefore create an enabling environment that addresses structural reasons for the non-participation of some actors (Phillips, 2002; Kelly and Caputo, 2005; LocalWorks, 2010).

Policies must hence, account for local conditions, and devise a way forward that is ‘gradually negotiated and constructed as a series of specific localized strategies to fit the characteristics of individual neighbourhoods’, with community inputs a central part of this process (Brannan et al., 2007: 12–13). Continued resourcing for engagement processes are essential, and the consequences for government therefore significant.

The current policy context of localism and citizenship in the UK

The UK Coalition government believes that ‘localism isn’t simply about giving power back to local government – it is about pushing power downwards and outwards to the lowest possible level, so that power is held by local people’ (Clark, 2010). This approach indicates positive implications for promoting green citizenship.

LocalWorks's take is different. They suggest that the UK is facing the ‘grave reality of a national trend of community decline, disengagement in politics and an unsustainable society’ (LocalWorks, 2011: 6). For one of our respondents, this trend is fortified by the UK's first-past-the-post voting system. A Green Party councillor described British democracy as ‘a bit strange’ because national politics is often hamstrung by commitments made to swing constituencies. National policies therefore tend to neglect larger issues such as climate change and consumptive habits.

The following Table 1 outlines key legislation and policies that set the tone for environmental citizenship in the UK.

Table 1 Key citizenship legislation in the UK
Full size table

While the policy context might therefore suggest that there are ample opportunities for citizen participation in policy-making processes, the implications for environmental citizenship are less clear. One environmental campaigner we spoke to argued that ‘there is no joined-up thinking and no overall mutually reinforcing strategy for what's good for climate and society’. The UK's Planning and Climate Change Coalition have criticized the 2011 Localism Act in that it does not integrate climate change effectively.Footnote 3 Indeed, the Coalition government has scrapped the legal requirement for local authorities to report on adaptation and mitigation indicators, both because it believes that it is at the local level that accountability should lie, and in order to reduce the bureaucratic burden on local authorities.

As our literature review demonstrated, action depends on resources and the capacity to act. According to Maxwell Boykoff, the public's caring capacity for climate change is ‘being stretched’ (Nielsen, 2011: 3). Some interviewees felt people were ‘not interested’ in climate change and that it was being ‘stuffed down people's throats and people are getting fed up with it’. Simply expecting individuals to change their behaviour without a formalized and supportive structure will not translate into reduced emissions.

Under the Localism Act, communities who do not have resources, including in-depth guidelines on the scope of the Act, and the ability to do capacity building around the Act, run the risk of failing to screen their neighbourhood plans for climate and environmental impacts. Lack of such support led many of our commentators to criticize the Big Society as a fig leaf for further cuts in public expenditure. One member from TT Exeter argued, ‘to implement the Localism Act you need more resources at local level, which local councils don’t have. Expecting capacity to come from communities is absurd’.

TT objectives

The TT movement is a citizen response to the challenges of climate change, described as ‘the fastest growing social movement in the UK’.Footnote 4 TTs fall under Dobson's ‘GREM’ because they aim to develop parallel public infrastructure, such as local currencies, community allotments, and car shares, to help people transition from a reliance on fossil fuels and towards sustainable consumption. TTs have similar objectives to Agenda 21 – a plan of action created during the 1992 Earth Summit to reduce human impact on the environment – or as one former green party councillor put it, ‘TTs are Agenda 21, 20 years on’. Those interviewed tended to agree that TTs represent a more bottom-up, hands-on movement than Agenda 21, which some perceived as being more abstract and top-down.

Each TT is established by a core set of concerned community members who want to address TT objectives in their own community. This means that the characteristics of the TT can very much depend on the individuals who set it up, the demographics of the town, and the values and interests of their communities. Often TTs can become an umbrella for members of other environmental groups to act under – which can lead to charges of them ‘swallowing’ other groups. A principal aim of the TT structure is to be ‘a hotbed of inspiration to do things’ as one TT member from Exeter argued; many TTs therefore develop independent entities such as Community Interest Companies (CICsFootnote 5) or Community led Energy Supply Companies (ESCOs).

TT members often join up as a lifestyle choice and also tend to opt out of more formal channels of political influence. One Green Party candidate argued that, ‘what they are doing is political, even if they don’t describe it as such’ while another interviewee suggested that TTs are contributing to the democratization of the grassroots.

Challenges facing TTs

The Green Party candidate told us that ‘TTs fit a certain demographic of middle-class and reasonably well-off people, which is evidenced in the towns from which they have sprung’. Its members tend to be people with a high degree of existing environmental awareness, meaning they are often perceived as ‘hippies’ and ‘exclusive’. A TT member said that their group only works with those who ‘get it’.

As volunteers, TTs tend to attract retired and middle-class people with ‘time on their hands’; of the few youth members involved, they tend only to engage in ‘peripheral activities’. TTs often experience a high level of initial interest that can taper off over time, leaving a group of core volunteers, ‘the usual suspects’, to manage the TTs' activities. As one TT member argued, ‘people easily lose heart and find themselves overwhelmed – we don’t have enough people to do small things’.

A member of TT Exeter has set up an ‘eco-hook’ (whereby environmental groups can meet in an empty shopping centre). While this a practical step in developing collaboration and synergies between initiatives, TTs need additional support to engage a wider audience. One TT member proposed a membership fee, which could pay an administrator to take the burden off its members, while others suggested learning from successful NGOs’ outreach strategies, canvassing those who have shown interest, and reaching out to a wider demographic. However, getting traction for these ideas would depend on the consent of other TT members: ‘people become very passionate about their work in TTs, and egos come into play rather than looking at the bigger picture’; some reported the lack of a decent facilitator to ensure an inclusive and strategic approach to their work.

Many TTs shy away from engaging in major fundraising activities, as they lack the capacity and resources to bid for large-scale proposals and grants. Clearly, a more targeted and custom approach to support community initiatives such as the TTs is needed, so that latent desire to engage in green citizenship is not stopped in its tracks: ‘we are trying but we don’t have the resources to succeed’.

Government policies can have a huge impact on the framing of TTs’ interventions and the resources they can work with. One key example is how TT-initiated ESCOs have used the government's Feed in Tariff (FIT) for community-based renewable energy projects. Around 15 ESCOs in the UK have issued community shares, raising approximately £200–400,000 each for renewable installations. Using the FIT, they can offer their shareholders a return of approximately 7 percent on their investment and raise money to fund further renewable energy projects in their communities. However, in October 2011, the government made a sudden announcement that it would cut the FIT in half,Footnote 6 preventing many planned projects from going ahead. It also damaged community trust in government to deliver on its promises.

The role of local councils in promoting green citizenship

At a local level, politics plays a key role in determining the success of TT initiatives, and there were contrasting views of local government support to TTs. Some TTs described their council as ‘unimaginative, miserable, and boring’, ‘extremely difficult to work with’, ‘we will do and you will listen’, and ‘like dinosaurs in their approach’. However, others cited councils that support TTs, as was the case when Dorset County Council used its networks to share a TT Poole petition for a feasibility study for tidal energy capacity in Poole Harbour.

The position of local councils in supporting TTs is therefore far from straightforward. Evidence suggests that this derives from the lack of formal engagement frameworks between councils and TTs. One member told us that ‘the district council likes to work with us, but they are under no obligation to take the agenda forward’. Council officers have a limited amount of time and resources to give to TTs, which can mean support wanes over time, while elected councillors can override more progressive sustainability officers who might be supportive of TTs. Another respondent suggested that some councils assumed people do not know about climate change, which prevents them from engaging with citizens on the issue.

To advance green citizenship, councils should engage in a hands-off approach where communities, not the council, take the credit for their initiatives. As one council officer argued, this means people in power – including the council – relinquishing control and trusting those around them. One innovative response by Lewes District Council has been to incubate small enterprises, such as second-hand furniture companies, which it passes over to communities to manage as a charity or a CIC.

As one former councillor explained, the support of the council depends on whether there is a groundswell of people who support environmental initiatives. ‘TTs tend to be dynamic in areas where the local council is dynamic on sustainability issues. In more deprived areas, TTs tend to be more lacklustre: their councils have to deal with more pressing socio-economic issues’. Our research also found that less dynamic communities, often with an ageing population, are less likely to have a TT.

Our research has identified engaging people from marginalized and poorer backgrounds to be a key challenge for TTs. Some TT members even went so far as to suggest that ‘poor people cannot be expected to understand and be involved in climate change’ and ‘you don’t achieve the transition by knocking on the doors of council estates (British social housing schemes)’. Some ESCOs are unwilling to sell shares on a syndicate basis to poorer groups as it is perceived to be ‘an administrative nightmare,’ involving even more work for overstretched TT members. This has created the perception that TTs are ‘a depoliticized movement unconcerned with social justice’, as one green campaigner told us.

However, councils themselves could ensure that they invest more resources in reaching out to a wider audience. One respondent argued: ‘TTs may not be reaching out to poor people on climate change, but who is’?

Incentives to promote green citizenship

There was consensus among those interviewed about the importance of financial incentives to promote green citizenship. While most argued that money should not be the driver of civic duty, it was seen to help kick-start initiatives and mobilize communities to act. An environmental NGO staff member suggested to us, that ‘while some people act on conviction, the majority of people need an incentive to act’.

However, the sudden change in the FIT outlines the importance for incentives to be durable. This is necessary not only for building confidence in any community-based investments, but also to ensure incentives last long enough to effect changes in social norms, such as energy usage, travel, and consumptive habits.

Regulation and enforcement mechanisms should favour the growth of the voluntary sector – and not just benefit investors. Ensuring targeted incentives appeal to us as both citizens and consumers can reduce the risk of a ‘schizophrenic’ green economy emerging, where as consumers we prioritize material advancement that may be at odds with positive environmental outcomes (Holmes et al., 2011).

Financial incentives are not the only means of incentivizing green citizenship: putting information in the public domain can be sufficient to encourage some people to get involved. Dorset County Council used to publish a calendar of twelve key sustainability indicators, free-of-charge to residents, which tracked progress against results and gave practical information about what people could do to take action. As one council officer argued, ‘people may need incentives, but more information and enforced legislation would be better’.

Public indexing of sustainability initiatives and windfall payments for community initiatives

Used strategically, the legislation outlined in Table 1 could be employed by TTs and councils to engage the wider community. In this section, we suggest promoting simple, joint local government and community-based monitoring initiatives to support collaboration in sustainable activities , as well as the design of methodologies which would feed into a Local Sustainability Index (LSI) to fund community-prioritized projects.

Monitoring and evaluation of targets is often seen as a box-ticking exercise, or an onerous activity that communities do not have the resources to undertake. However, if TTs could evidence the impact of their activities to government and the private sector, it could enable them to access funding.

Because, as previously outlined, adaptation and mitigation indicators reported to national government are now recorded only on a voluntary basis, one respondent raised concerns that sustainability would drop down the list of local council priorities. Currently, the only climate change-related indicator local councils are obliged to report centrally covers emissions from council-owned buildings.Footnote 7

Our interviews found that the design of local climate change targets is an area where community participation is inadequate. Our proposed LSI could include adaptation, mitigation, and civic participation performance indicators. Factoring in resource differentials, population density and progress made against a baseline, local councils could receive windfall payments based on performance to invest in community-prioritized sustainability projects. Such projects could come directly from neighbourhood plans under the Localism Act. The index could also incorporate monitoring impacts from the local private sector and help ensure that the three pillars of sustainability – economy, society and the environment – were reported at the local level.

Resources could be raised by using a proportion of funds from the Climate Change Levy (a tax on commercial and industrial energy usage), which central government currently partially invests in renewable energy infrastructure. Other locally raised green taxes that promote low-carbon growth should also be explored. By disbursing tax in this way, central government could play a key role in supporting community-led sustainability initiatives, incentivizing action, and ensuring local-level ownership of sustainability action.

Further, by complementing existing participatory legislation such as the Sustainable Communities Act (SCA) and the Localism Act, a local sustainability index could concretize a decentralized, effectively regulated approach to sustainability.

A local sustainability matrix could provide direction for TTs and local councils, and help TTs use their community's ranking in the index to advocate for change. Under a formalized scheme, communities could publish their planned project to attract investment from within and outside their communities.

However, because the proposed model goes against the UK government's current thinking, it would require communities, TTs, and other local actors to invoke the SCA and lobby for change.

Conclusion

The UK has the potential to produce one of the world's strongest grass-roots sustainability movements, in a context of growing devolution of powers to local communities.

This article has shown the fundamental challenges that groups of volunteers face. The TTs, despite achieving some successes in their respective communities, face considerable capacity and resource constraints that hamper their engagement with local government, their efforts to reach out to wider audiences, and their access to funding. Trust in government risks being undermined by sudden legislative reforms that threaten TTs' resource base.

TTs may use key legislation such as the SCA and Localism Act to advance their objectives in ways that are tailored to their community. Yet, meaningful participation should be set against the context of ensuring that those who wish to become green citizens have sufficient incentives and resources to do so.

We have proposed a Local Sustainability Index (SCI) based on collaborative monitoring and evaluation to promote synergies between communities and local government, in order to raise resources for community initiatives such as TTs. The scheme would give TTs a formalized and participatory structure, within which they could contribute evidence of the impact of their efforts. It is hoped that the funding raised by this proposed scheme would incentivize green citizenship at the local level, to ensure that central government provides an effective regulatory framework that both communities and local councils could trust.Footnote 8