BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Transition Management seeks to influence the direction and pace of societal change by enabling new ways of organising, doing, and thinking. It supports actors to move beyond incremental problem solving and engage in transformative change towards desired futures, to stimulate place-based sustainability transitions. A central feature is the establishment of a Transition Arena (TA): a co-creative learning space whose goal is to develop radical ways of thinking. Transition management seldom aims at broad engagement across society. Rather, Transition management depends on targeted inclusion of actors who have interests in the transformation in question.

  • System Understanding: Insight into system dynamics and interlinkages of multiple domains, actors, and scales.

  • Innovation Inspiration: Inspire innovation by questioning the status quo and being open to unorthodox ideas and actions.

  • Supporting Change Agents: Support change agents who are already adopting alternatives, thereby triggering transitions to a greater extent than starting from vested interests.

  • Local Change Catalyst: Catalyze local change, inspire new and enhance existing initiatives that contribute to the envisioned future.

  • Collective Empowerment: Enable actors in the chosen locality to tackle challenges and seize opportunities for a sustainable transformation

  • Strategic Planning Needed: Requires detailed planning and knowledgeable facilitators.

  • Challenges in Implementation: Demanding and time-consuming approach that is prone to challenges such as lack of volunteer interest and participant drop-out.

  • Documentation Hurdles: Difficulty of documenting effects which may therefore be interpreted as implementation failure, even when processes are successful.

EXAMPLE:

Tomorrow: The TOMORROW project produced a workbook on TM for Just and Climate Neutral Cities drawing on their work with six cities implementing participatory governance processes aimed at developing 2050 transition roadmaps.

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