Abstract
Climate change demands for a deep and collaborative transformation. Sustainability transitions research is becoming more interested in governance issues, and in this chapter, we explore learnings from recent experimentation efforts at local level.
The “Municipalities in Transition” is a systemic and operational framework developed and tested through participatory action research in order to promote synergies in the interplay between local governments and civil society. Local actors can use this instrument to capture the governance imprint of mitigation and adaptation efforts and are challenged to reorganize and expand it.
From March 2018 to April 2019, six communities in five countries (Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) decided to experiment with the “Municipalities in Transition” framework, developed within the Transition movement. After training, they set a governance model, prepared a baseline collecting 189 existing local transformative initiatives, and planned and implemented 14 impactful actions. Narratives of Change and Critical Turning Points were used to harvest learnings.
Even in a short time, quite dramatic changes occurred. This was 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. These changes represent new ways of doing, organizing, framing and/or knowing, as expressed in the theory of Transformative Social Innovation.
The “Municipalities in Transition” is contextualized in the profusion of different frameworks of governance of transformations, allowing to illuminate the novelty on climate change management at local level. Perspectives on how it might become an integral system for regenerative governance are presented.
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Acknowledgments
Funders that made this research possible should be mentioned, namely, KR Foundation (Grant ID G-1610-01869, supporting MiT) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, the Portuguese public agency that supports science, technology, and innovation (scholarship PD/BD/128170/2016).
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Macedo, P. (2021). Municipalities in Transition: Experimenting a New Governance System for Tackling Climate Change. In: Luetz, J.M., Ayal, D. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57281-5_143
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