Abstract
Communities across the globe face myriad and interacting socio-economic and environmental challenges. This chapter evaluates a citizen-led, community-scale response to these challenges offered by the Transition Movement. Phronetic inquiry is used as an analytic framework to answer four value-rational questions posed: Where are we going? Is this desirable? What should be done? Who gains and who loses? The analysis points to the strengths and potential of the Transition Movement for mobilizing a community-scale response to global hazards, but it also highlights possible shortcomings, especially for who gains and loses because anecdotal evidence suggest that Transitioning communities are predominately White, educated, upper-middle class. The chapter empirically tests these anecdotes and finds that Transition host communities in the United States are indeed generally better educated and less racially and ethnically diverse than American communities on average. There is less evidence for an upper-middle-class nature of the Movement in the United States.
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Notes
- 1.
Flyvbjerg (2001), summoning Foucault and Bourdieu, recommends an extended version of the fourth question: Who gains and who loses, and through what power relations? Although our analysis is not dismissive or ignorant of power relations, we chose to ask and answer the shorter version due to space limitations. A full treatment of winners and losers that incorporates an assessment of power relations requires a larger discussion than can reasonably be offered here.
- 2.
The collapse of global financial markets in 2008 occurred after The Transition Handbook was published so the three forces the Transition Movement model confronts today was a dual threat (peak oil and climate change) when the movement formed in 2005. The dysfunctional macroeconomy force is a post- 2008 addition to the movement’s interpretation of why the current trajectory of economic, political, and technological development cannot be sustained indefinitely.
- 3.
In the early days of the movement, the phrase “Transition Town” was used but this wording quickly became problematic when larger, more metropolitan communities located in places such as Brixton chose to adopt the model.
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Barnes, P., Sarzynski, A. (2019). Mobilizing Communities to Confront Global Challenges: A Phronetic Inquiry. In: Kendra, J., Knowles, S., Wachtendorf, T. (eds) Disaster Research and the Second Environmental Crisis. Environmental Hazards. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04691-0_6
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