Exportar Publicação

Quintão, F. (2023). Experimenting with multi-actor governance: impacts and challenges for local transitions. PhDays 2023 - INGENIO (CSIC-UPV).

F. D. Quintão,  "Experimenting with multi-actor governance: impacts and challenges for local transitions", in PhDays 2023 - INGENIO (CSIC-UPV), Valência, 2023

@misc{quintão2023_1766309610718,
	author = "Quintão, F.",
	title = "Experimenting with multi-actor governance: impacts and challenges for local transitions",
	year = "2023",
	howpublished = "Digital"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Experimenting with multi-actor governance: impacts and challenges for local transitions
T2  - PhDays 2023 - INGENIO (CSIC-UPV)
AU  - Quintão, F.
PY  - 2023
CY  - Valência
AB  - Grassroots initiatives have shown relevant contributions to democratic innovation (Smith & Stirling, 2018), experimenting with participatory and deliberative ideas in their inner life, prefiguring alternative forms of democratic politics, and disseminating these ideas within institutions (della Porta, 2022). These social movements frequently seek to unravel the environment-economy dichotomy inherent in contemporary capitalism, directing their action to issues like local food systems, small-scale and alternative energy economies, sustainable communities, and housing (Star, 2020). However, despite having common agendas, they present crucial differences among their discourses regarding themes such as the role of the State, degree of reform or radical innovation, degree of the imaginative character of the sustainability vision, and degree of opposition to capitalism (Feola & Jaworska, 2019).
A well-studied social movement grounded in the economic imaginary of degrowth is the Transition movement (Longhurst et al., 2017), which started with a local initiative in 2005 in Totnes, UK. Since then, it has spread to over 48 countries, with thousands of groups organised in different contexts, such as towns, villages, cities, universities, and schools. The movement soon institutionalised itself as a charity in the UK called Transition Network, which aims to support the movement. Since 2016, the movement has been experimenting with a shared governance model based on sociocracy and holocracy principles. It aims to distribute power, resources, and responsibilities transparently across the international network. However, this recent experience has not been deeply analysed by scholarly work.
Aiming to empower the National Hubs, which support the local initiatives in many of the countries that are part of the movement and represent them in the international network, the Hub’s Heart Circle and the Hub’s Groups Assembly were created as international decision-making instances. Parallel to this process, the movement also actively developed initiatives to influence public policy at the local and international levels. In 2014, The Transition Network was one of the co-founders of ECOLISE, the European network for community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability initiatives, a Brussels-based organisation firmly focused on representing networks of community-led initiatives interests along with EU policy. Aiming to influence policy also at the local level, the Hubs group, in partnership with Transition Network, launched the Municipalities in Transition (MiT) project in 2017, aiming “to create a clear framework for how Transition groups and municipalities can create sustainable change together” (MiT Website).
This paper aims to understand how initiatives of the Transition movement build relationships with public institutions, for what purposes and which dilemmas are faced. Some questions to guide the research are: 1) How has the experiment with a shared governance model (and its shifts in power relations within the network) reflected in the capacity to influence public policy at different levels?; 2) How was the relationship between actors involved in these policy influence processes governed? 3) How do the different actors participating in these policy influence processes assess its results and contributions to transitions?
Data will be collected in two dimensions of the Transition movement, internally and externally. Internally, the research will be informed by documents about governance, in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors of the Transition Network, National Hubs and local initiatives, and participant observation in the international decision-making instances (Hub’s Heart Circle and Hub’s Groups Assembly). Externally, documents about policy advocacy will be analysed, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in the policy advocacy processes led by Ecolise and the Municipalities in Transition project will be conducted. The paper aims to contribute to two research directions for the Sustainability Transitions’ agenda (Köhler et al., 2019): the application of the ideas of micro-politics, power, and agency in governance experimentations; and to develop a framework to analyse how experimental governance approaches support transitions.
ER  -