The Recovery and Resilience Facility of the European Union (RRF) has assigned over 30% of its total budget to promoting the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Based on a review of literature, policy, and strategic documents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders in public institutions and civil society, this presentation addresses how contributions brought by community-led initiatives (CLIs) towards energy transition have been considered within the RRF. CLIs constitute the core of the regenerative approach to development, which treats natural and human processes as inherently linked. Such an approach goes beyond sustainability to embrace social-ecological resilience, understood as the capacity to adapt, transform and remain cohesive in face of external pressures. The goal is to promote human settlements and supply chains based on synergies between communities and the resources of their territories, with the goal of improving the resilience of social and natural systems. CLIs complement, in important ways, the logics of bureaucratisation and commodification that respectively mark state-led and market-led approaches, leading to creation of new hybrid institutions, flexibly able to reconcile impulses towards transformation and stability. They thus provide additional and potentially improved pathways for achieving carbon neutrality and delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The analysis will pay special attention to the involvement of CLIs in policy making and implementation, as well as the accessibility of funding lines within the Just Transition Fund and Horizon Europe to these initiatives.

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Sustainable Development Goals Resilience,Community-led Initiatives,Community Resilience,Regenerative Development

• Sociology - Social Sciences