Transition arena manuals

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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

To break away from business-as-usual requires new approaches and strategies. Transition management has been developed explicitly as such an approach and as a strategy to open up desired transition pathways in societal contexts that are ‘locked-in’, in which people and organisations are stuck into addressing persistent problems with improvements, instead of shaping transformative change towards new and desired futures.

To proactively support desired system change (transition), implies an approach that develops the necessary transformative power: a compelling narrative, the critical mass, and a legitimizing analysis that all combined can help guide and accelerate fundamental change.

This page provides insights into the application of the transition management principles in practice through the organization of transition arenas in a variety of contexts. The diversity of applications shows that each context requires a different operational design of the arena, thereby adjusting the transition management principles and the generic methodology to the local transition context, actor constellations and particular societal dynamics.

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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