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Relocalisation and the Transition Movement

Rob Hopkins

Looking back over The Transition Handbook, the book I wrote in 2007 which helped to create what is now an international movement in 44 countries, it is alarming to see how much of what was predicted in there has come to be. It talked about a time when oil prices would consistently be above $100 a barrel, when the Age of Cheap Energy would be conclusively a thing of the past, when the impacts of climate change would be clear, everyday and commonplace, when denial would start to become socially unacceptable and when economies would start to unravel. We are in those times now. We’re there.

What the book also rather boldly suggested was that we would see a response kicking in. A response that started with ordinary people working at the scale over which they felt they could have an influence. Rolling up their sleeves and transmuting this deep sense of unease and uncertainty into creativity and a sense of purpose. Starting, without permission, to build a new economy around them, one based on the idea of community resilience as a form of economic development. A form of economic development that starts on our streets, in our neighbourhoods, in the places we live. Transition is that response, or at least, it is one manifestation of that response.

It is a response founded on the concept of resilience. Resilience was once famously described by football manager Iain Dowie as referring to ‘bouncebackability’. Many definitions use it to refer to this idea of bouncing back after an unexpected shock. I wonder though whether we should actually be thinking about it in terms of ‘bouncing forwards’, using shock, or the expectation of it, to evolve and to see it as an opportunity for great creativity and inventiveness. After all, in a world changing so fast, what would we ‘bounce back’ to?

I also, having observed the process of Transition in my town for seven years now, see resilience as referring to the degree of possibility we have breathed into our local community. When we encounter shocks and disruptions, the most powerful things we can have at our disposal are ideas and possibilities. Possibilities enable us to see times of rapid change as a huge opportunity. Encountering shocks with no possibilities at our fingertips would be bleak indeed.

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At its heart, Transition is a simple idea. The idea that the scale of changes that we need to make in these uncertain times go far beyond changing our light bulbs and upgrading to an electric car. In a nutshell:

Y The climate scientists tell us that we need to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% a year if we are to avoid a 2°C increase on pre-industrial temperatures

Y Geologists tell us that we have reached the end of the cheap and easy-to-extract fossil fuels, and that what are presented as ‘the new golden age of fossil fuels’ (tar sands, fracking etc) are really little more than a much over-hyped retirement party

Y Economic growth is an increasingly redundant idea. It takes more and more debt to create each percentage of growth. In the US in the 1970s, one dollar of growth required $1.74 in debt, by the 2000s that had risen to $5.67. Increases in growth also require increases in carbon emissions. Can we afford economic growth any more?

For me, they necessitate rethinking the scale on which we do things. Does an economically globalised economy make sense in that context? Does it make sense that an apple from New Zealand is still cheaper than one from up the road? The shift demanded of us by these huge challenges inevitably means a more localised world, one where resilience matters. We can choose whether we

Dunbar Bakery, a community-supported bakery, initiated by Sustainable Dunbar

Illustration by Rob Hopkins for his book, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 2014.

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see that as a disaster and as a move away from something irreplaceable, or we can see that as a huge opportunity for some brilliant creativity.

What I see, in community after community who have embraced the Transition approach, is people opting for the latter. I see the phenomenal creativity that it unleashes, in a way that central or local government, or business, could never dream of. I was in Milwaukee recently, and spoke to one Transitioner there who told me:

Transition is the audacious suggestion that in order to live sustainably, we actually need to change the way we live. This could actually be a joyful experience. It’s not about deprivation, it’s about finding a new kind of joy.

Although these key ideas of localisation and resilience are acting as powerful lenses through which to rethink local economies, what impresses and moves me in the many communities with active Transition groups is the depth of the creativity it enables. It’s not some dry intellectual process of formulating new energy policies (important though those would be). When faced with climate change, peak oil and economic uncertainty we should be powerless, right? Frozen like rabbits in the headlights? Throwing our hands up and assuming that it is all beyond us, or that it is all too late? In reality, in thousands of communities who have been inspired by this Transition idea, it’s exactly the opposite.

The ‘audacious suggestion’ of Transition is often the spark that is needed to light a community’s creative blue touchpaper. Here are some examples of the kind of things they get up to:

Y Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Palace Pint project is getting people across the area to grow hops to flavour a locally produced pint. People are growing them in gardens, up balconies and fire-escapes, and even in pub back gardens

Y Transition Meaford in Canada is working with its local library so that as well as being a conventional library, it is also now a Seed Library

Y A number of London Transition groups are part of a scheme called ‘The Edible Bus Stop’, building productive food gardens around bus stops, and now around a bus station, all along the same bus route, the idea being that a trip across London can also now be an immersion in urban agriculture

Y Transition Town Tooting’s Foodival is an annual occasion which takes a sideways look at what local food means in a very diverse part of London. Food grown in gardens and allotments is brought to Tooting High Street where it is cooked by cooks

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in a range of different cultural traditions, and distributed to passers by

Y The Restart Project in Brixton is about ‘preparing the ground for a future economy of maintenance and repair by reskilling communities, supporting repair entrepreneurs, and helping people of all walks of life to be more resilient’

Y The Bristol Pound, with its beautiful notes and its Pay-By-Text scheme is a bold and refreshing approach to economic localisation, with the full support of the city’s Council. It is only just starting to get a sense of its potential, and is acting as an inspiration for other towns and cities

Increasingly the scale of their ambition is growing. From small food growing or energy-efficiency projects, Transition groups are now stepping up to become kind of complementary development agencies, reimagining what their local economies could look like, and then making that happen. Transition Town Totnes has produced a ‘Local Economic Blueprint’, a detailed mapping of the local economy which presents the hard economic case for a more localised approach, opened a ‘REconomy Centre’ as an incubator for new businesses, runs a ‘Local Entrepreneurs Forum’ every year to support new entrepreneurs, and is increasingly seen as one of the key voices on the economic future of the town. It’s the idea of ‘community resilience as economic development.’

Transition is a social technology designed to work at the local level. It is driven by what people are passionate about. If the people who get involved in a Transition project are all passionate about local food, it is unlikely that you will end up with a community energy company. As Howard Thurman famously put it:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

When we started Transition, I imagined it as an environmental process. Now I see it as a cultural process. What does the culture of the place you live need to do in order to be best prepared for change? Transition can start to change that culture, introducing an invitation to work with other people who ordinarily you wouldn’t meet, and to create something extraordinary with them. As a woman I met in a London initiative told me, ‘I’ve lived here for 22 years, but I feel I have known this place so much better in the last two years when I’ve been involved in Transition’. It reweaves connections, it brings people together with a creative impulse.

Some might say, ‘Well that’s all very well, but in the context of the challenges set out earlier, it’s a drop in the ocean’. They may be right. But my sense is that Transition embodies the possibility of something that few other things can

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achieve. It is about what is currently politically impossible becoming politically inevitable. Transition can start to change the tone, change the background buzz, change the sense of what’s possible.

It has a tremendous ‘power to convene’, to get all manner of people in a room together, dreaming, planning and doing. It does so in ways that aren’t what people expect. Transition ‘shops’ on High Streets that invite people in to share their hopes and fears for the place, Open Space events where the agenda is created by those attending, fuelled with tea and cake, pieces of community theatre that invite people to be part of not just imagining the future, but spending time in it, walking around in it and discussing it with others who have also made that journey.

What we are seeing emerging around the world is a new narrative for these times. A narrative that says these are extraordinary times, and times that demand us to be extraordinary. A narrative that invites us to be entrepreneurial, to not just dream of a new economy, but to bring it into being, business by business. A narrative that isn’t about each place starting from scratch, but connecting communities in a ‘learning network’, in which ideas, successes and failures can be rapidly communicated around the world. A narrative that invites us to come together in new ways and to work alongside other people to transform our small corner of the world. You could think of it as the ultimate form of ‘impact investing’.

Fujino Electric Company, Japan. Solar panels used to power festivals and musical events in the period following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011. ‘Creating a mini solar system workshop, we invite people from all over Japan and teach them how to connect solar panels and batteries and cables and everything to create electricity. Before this, people had never thought about creating their own electric company but now are starting to see that they can.’ Hide Enomoto, Transition Fujino

Photo by Kazuhiro Hakamada

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Perhaps one of the key parts of this has been how Transition has, from the start, consciously seen the arts as being central to its success. The arts can powerfully make the kind of future we want to see become an actual reality around us. It can invite us to step across into the future. It can open us to new possibilities and it can celebrate and document what we’re doing in playful and creative ways. Ultimately, it can spark change, and change is what we need right now.

What Transition does is to give that a narrative, a context. What is most heartening, around the world, is to see how many people

have already started to step up, and how much fun they are having in doing so. You will hear many such stories among these pages, I hope they inspire you to become part of them.

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At the Transition Network International Conference in 2012, 240 people built the living, breathing imaginary low carbon Transition Town Anywhere in Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, London with governance, communication, health and wellbeing, transport systems, the arts, food, education, innovation and business enterprises. Complete with a tenant’s charter, a celebratory town centre opening and picnic, a 3D resilient local economy and town was built, lived in, celebrated and taken down all in the space of five hours.

‘We built up participation slowly, working from the individual, going through neighbours, street then to the town. Aesthetically there were no post-its but hundreds of blackboards, chalk, cardboard, string, clear space, emptiness, one colour and and an approach of “let’s make it a story”,’ said key organiser Ruth Ben-Tovim. ‘Something happened in the space between us all that made me feel optimistic about the future. We have everything we need at our fingertips to create the town centres of the future.’

‘We explored the relationships between the different businesses, what was missing, how it might all work,’ added Rob Hopkins. ‘People met each other in this world we had created, got lost in it, danced in it, brewed imaginary beer and baked imaginary bread in it, generated energy from their cardboard solar panels. It was magical, a firsthand taste of a new economy, a new way of doing things.’

Photos by Mike Grenville and Laura Whitehead