Transition arena manuals

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Transition arena is a key tool to generate a compelling narrative, a critical mass and a legitimizing analysis for fundamental change. Transition arenas are connected to the approach of transition management, which has been developed to be used for breaking away from business-as-usual. Transition management can be used as a strategy to open up desired transition pathways in societal contexts where people and organisations are stuck in addressing persistent problems with improvements, instead of bringing about transformational change.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.

General introduction to approach

Central to Transition Management is a set of principles that are based on understanding the concept of societal transitions as complex, non-linear, long-term processes of societal change. Transition management as a policy and management strategy seeks to anticipate transitions, accelerate and guide the types of emerging changes that could contribute to transitions with desired outcomes.

There are a number of basic principles for a transition management ‘mindset’ and for its operational practice:

• Systemic: engage systemwide with emerging dynamics across societal levels
• Back-casting: taking desired, future transition states as a starting point
• Selective: focus on transformative agency already engaged with transitioning
• Adaptive: experimenting towards multiple goals and transition pathways
• Learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning: ensure monitoring and reflexivity

These principles can be operationalized in different ways whereby transition management always tries to influence change in four dimensions:

• Strategig/orienting: problem structuring, envisioning, and establishment of the transition arena
• Tactical/agenda-setting: developing coalitions, images and transition agendas
• Operational/Activating: mobilizing actors, executing projects and experiments
• Reflexive/reflecting: evaluating, monitoring and learning

The transition arena operationalizes and connects these four types of activities. It acts as temporary innovation network aimed at developing radical ways of thinking and acting beyond ‘business-as-usual’.And it is a collective and co-creative learning process that increases self-organisation capacity of the participants. The main outcome of the arena is a sense of direction, an impulse for local change and collective empowerment

Shapes, sizes and applications

[Provide some general insight on the different shapes, sizes and applications of the approach. You might also provide some insight in the development stage and level of maturity of the approaches, their successes and limitations and level of transferability (max. 1 paragraph).]

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

[Describe how the approach addresses and/or tackles unsustainability and injustice in cities, taking into consideration the following four questions (max. 1-2 paragraphs)

Urban: to what extent does the approach focus on the urban? Which scale of the urban or which urban territories?

Justice: to what extent does the approach address (in)justice. What type of (in)justice is addressed, how and at which scale?.

Sustainability: what type of (un)sustainability issues are addressed, how and at which scale?

Linking sustainability and justice: to what extent and how does the approach link or connect sustainability and justice?]

Narrative of change

[Describe in 1 short paragraph what is the narrative of change of the approach.

What is the problem that the cluster/approach addresses?

What is the underlying premise of how the cluster/approach tries to address this problem and achieve change? ]

Transformative potential

[To what extent does the approach alter, change or challenge existing power relations? (To what extent are) which power relations considered as problematic (unequal, oppressive, unjust, excluding etc.) by the approach, implicitly or explicitly? (How) are these power relations being framed, problematised, challenged, altered or replaced by the cluster/approach? And/or which existing power relations are (at the risk of) being reproduced/ strengthened by the approach, and how?]

Illustration

[Briefly describe one or two illustrative approach(es) or case study based on the questions 1,2,3 & 4 above]

Suggested reading

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