Transition is a method of community response to climate change, resource depletion and economic turbulence. After it was first developed in Totnes, England in 2006, Transition initiatives sprang up throughout the United Kingdom. Many community projects around the world are using the seven principles and twelve ingredients of Transition, listed below. The Transition Neighborhoods program being developed by Transtion NYC, the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub, and Transition US is an adaptation of this organizing method to large urban centers in the US. We hope you'll join us.
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Seven Guiding Principles of Transition
1. Positive Visioning
2. Help People Access Good Information & Trust Them to Make Good Decisions
3. Inclusion and Openness
4. Enable Sharing and Networking
5. Build Resilience
6. Inner and Outer Transition
7. Self-organization at the Appropriate Level
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1. Positive Visioning
Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present-day dependence on fossil fuel. Our primary focus is not campaigning against things but rather on creating positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities. The generation of new stories and myths is central to this visioning work.
2. Help People Access Good Information & Trust Them to Make Good Decisions
Transition Initiatives dedicate themselves, through all aspects of their work, to raising awareness of peak oil, climate change and economic instability. In doing so they recognize the responsibility to present this information in ways that are playful, articulate, accessible, engaging and which enable people to feel enthused and empowered. Transition Initiatives focus on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information is deeply contradictory. The messages are non-directive, respecting each person’s ability to respond in a way that is appropriate to their situation.
3. Inclusion and Openness
Successful Transition Initiatives need an unprecedented coming together of the broad diversity of society. They dedicate themselves to ensuring that their decision making processes and their working groups embody principles of openness and inclusion. This principle also refers to the principle of each initiative reaching the community in its entirety, and endeavoring, from an early stage to engage their local business community, the diversity of community groups and local government authorities. It makes explicit the principle that there is no room for “them and us” thinking in the challenge of energy descent planning.
4. Enable Sharing and Networking
Transition Initiatives dedicate themselves to sharing their successes, failures, insights and connections at various scales across the Transition network, so as to more widely build up a collective body of experience.
5. Build Resilience
Building resilience is the capacity for our businesses, communities and settlements to withstand shock. Transition initiatives commit to building resilience across a wide range of areas (food, economics, energy, etc.) and also on a range of scales (from the local to the national) as seem appropriate – and to setting them within an overall context of the need to do everything we can to ensure environmental resilience.
6. Inner and Outer Transition
The challenges we face are not just caused by a misuse of technology, but are a direct result of our worldview and belief system. The impact of the information about the state of our planet can generate fear and grief – which may underlie the state of denial in which many people are caught. Psychological models can help us understand what is really happening and avoid unconscious processes sabotaging change, e.g., addiction and behavioral change models. This principle also honors the fact that Transition thrives because it enables and supports people to do what they are passionate about; what they feel called to do.
7. Subsidiarity: Self-organization at the Appropriate Level
The intention of the Transition model is not to centralize or control decision making, but rather to work with everyone so that it is practiced at the most appropriate, practical and empowering level, and in such a way that it models the ability of natural systems to self organize.
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The 12 Ingredients of Transitioning
These 12 Ingredients don’t necessarily follow each other logically in the order they are set out here; every Transition Initiative weaves through them differently. The 12 Ingredients are in part shaped by your experience of using The Ingredients are not meant to be prescriptive. You do not have to follow them
religiously, step by step, you can use the ones that seem useful, add new ones you come up with, and disregard others that don’t work for your group.
1. Create Initiating Group & design its demise from the outset
This stage puts a core team in place to drive the project forward during the initial phases. We recommend that Initiating Groups aim to get through Ingredients 2 – 5, and agree that once a minimum of 4 sub-groups are formed, the Initiating Group disbands and reforms with a person from each of those groups. It is important to put the success of the project above individuals involved. Ultimately your Facilitating or Steering Group should be made up of 1 representative from each working sub-group.
2. Raise Awareness
This stage will identify your key allies, build crucial networks and prepare the community in general for the launch of your Transition initiative. For an effective Energy Descent Action plan to evolve, its participants have to understand the potential effects of both Resource Depletion and Climate Change – the former demanding a drive to increase community resilience, the latter a reduction in carbon Screenings of key movies along with panels and talks by experts in the fields of Climate Change, Resource Depletion and Alternative Economics are recommended. Articles in newspapers, radio interviews presentations to groups including schools, are also part of the toolkit to get people aware of the issues, and ready to start thinking of solutions.
3. Lay the Foundations
This stage is about networking with existing groups and individuals, making clear to them that the Transition Initiative is designed to incorporate their previous efforts and future inputs by looking at the future in a new way. Acknowledge and honor the work they do, and stress that they have a vital role to play. Give them a concise and accessible overview of Peak Oil, what it means, how it relates to
Climate Change, how it might affect the community in question, and the key challenges it
presents. Set out your thinking about how a Transition Initiative might be able to act as a catalyst for getting the community to explore solutions and to begin thinking about grassroots mitigation strategies.
4. Organize a Great Unleashing
This Ingredient creates a milestone that marks the project’s “coming of age,” moves it into the community at large, builds a momentum to propel your initiative forward for the next period of its work and celebrates your community’s desire to take action. We suggest this take place about 6 months to a year after your first “awareness-raising” event. Your unleashing will need to bring people up to speed on Peak Oil and Climate Change, but in a spirit of “we can do something about this” rather than a doom and gloom scenario. One item of content that we’ve seen work very well is a presentation on the practical and psychological barriers to personal change – after all, this is all about what we do as individuals. It needn’t be just talks, it could include music, food, dance - whatever you feel reflects your community’s intention to embark on this collective
5. Form Working Groups
Part of the process of developing an Energy Descent Action Plan is tapping into the collective genius of the community. Crucial for this is to set up a number of smaller groups to focus on specific aspects of the process. Each of these groups will develop their own ways of working and their own activities, but will all
fall under the umbrella of the project as a whole. Ideally, working groups are needed for all aspects of life that your community needs to sustain itself and thrive. Examples of these are: food, waste, energy, education, youth, local economics, transport, water, local government. Each of your working groups looks
at their area and tries to determine the best ways of building community resilience and reducing their carbon footprint. Their solutions will form the backbone of the Energy Descent Action Plan.
6. Use Open Space Facilitation Technology: Open Space Facilitation
Technology is a highly effective approach to running meetings for Transition Initiatives. By the end of each meeting, everyone has said what they needed to, extensive notes have been taken, lots of networking has had taken place, and a huge number of ideas have been identified, and visions set out.
7. Develop visible practical manifestations of the project
It is essential to avoid any sense that your project is just about talking. Begin from an early stage to create practical, high visibility manifestations in your community. These will significantly enhance people’s perceptions of the project and also their willingness to participate. There’s a difficult balance to achieve here during these early stages. You need to demonstrate visible progress, without embarking on projects that will ultimately have no place on the Energy Descent Action Plan.
8. Facilitate the Great Reskilling
If we are to respond to Peak Oil and Climate Change by moving to a lower energy future and relocalizing our communities, then we’ll need many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted. One of the most useful things a Transition Initiative can do is to reverse the “great deskilling” of the last 40 years by offering training in a range of skills.
Research among the older members of our communities is instructive – after all, they lived before the throwaway society took hold and they understand what a lower energy society might look like. Some examples of courses: recycling grey water, cooking, bicycle maintenance, natural building, herbal medicines, basic home energy efficiency, practical food growing, harvesting rainwater, composting waste (the list is endless). Your Great Reskilling program will give people a powerful realization of their own ability to solve problems, to achieve practical results and to work cooperatively alongside other people.
They’ll also appreciate that learning can be fun!
9. Build a Bridge to Local Government
Whatever the degree of groundswell your Transition Initiative manages to generate, however many practical projects you’ve initiated, and however wonderful your Energy Descent Plan is, you will not progress far unless you have cultivated a positive and productive relationship with your local government authority. Whether it is planning issues, funding or networking, you need them on board. Contrary to your expectations, you may well find that you are pushing against an open door.
10. Honor the Elders
To rebuild a picture of a lower energy society, we have to engage with those who directly remember the transition to the age of Cheap Oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960. While you clearly want to avoid any sense that what you are advocating is ‘going back’ or ‘returning’ to some dim distant past, there is much to be learnt from how things were done in the past, what the invisible connections between the different elements of society were, and how daily life was supported when less oil was available. Finding these things out can be deeply illuminating, and can lead to our feeling much more connected to place
when we are developing our Transition Initiatives.
11. Let it Go Where it Wants to Go
Although you may start out developing your Transition Initiative with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall. Your role is not to come up with all the answers, but to act as a catalyst for the community to design their own transition.
If you keep your focus on the key design criteria – building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint – you’ll watch as the collective genius of the community enables a feasible, practicable and highly inventive solution to emerge.
12. Create an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP)
The Energy Descent Action Plan is a detailed, clearly articulated strategic pathway away from oil dependency for your locality.