Transition initiatives are the pulse of transformative change, by demonstrating and innovating how citizens and communities can live sustainably. With this realization come a number of critical questions concerning their impact in changing conventional course of action and in balancing imperative for change with remaining inclusive to citizens in their context.
The ARTS (Accelerating and Rescaling Transitions to Sustainability) project aimed to understand how transition initiatives could accelerate sustainability transitions and to examine the conditions that catalyze change towards a sustainable low-carbon society. The objective of ARTS was to benefit policy, practice and theory and create opportunities for (social and governance) innovation by coupling, re-scaling and accelerating sustainability initiatives in European city-regions. The ARTS consortium consisted of 10 partners from 10 European countries
Lessons for broader transitions
The focal unit of analysis of this project was innovative activities and their related actor-networks that are fundamentally changed energy, food, shelter and mobility provisioning patterns at the scale of a city or region, situated within a wider European context. ARTS explored how lessons from these initiatives could be drawn for broader transitions to sustainable low-carbon European societies.
Specifically, the ARTS consortium aimed to investigate and deepen our knowledge on the following research gaps that related to the key conditions that can be associated to the acceleration of transitions in the context of cities and regions, namely: synergy, diversity, speed of change, inclusivity, knowledge dissemination and social learning. The project explored these conditions based on a diverse set of transition initiatives in five transition regions across Europe in an inter- and transdisciplinary way: Brighton, Budapest, Dresden, Flanders, and Stockholm.
Transition initiatives and domains
These transition initiatives acted upon low-carbon challenges and have started to transform (to a limited extend) structures, cultures and practices in the domains that impacted the low-carbon challenge at hand. In the transition regions mentioned above, different transition initiatives took action across multiple domains and impacted on one or on each of the low-carbon domains: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Resource Management, Energy Use and Supply, Living and Building, Transition and Mobility.
The project identified the values, conditions and mechanisms for accelerating sustainability transitions, developed strategies to assist and stimulate their acceleration and assessed them with dynamic modeling approaches.