What to do if your council is fond of Transition?
Hi,
what if all of a sudden, your council is starting to talk transition all the time? Say they want to start using the transition model to green a district/borough in your city, and they call on the local transition folks for collaboration (ugh!)....It would sound like a very interesting opportunity, not one to loose. Has anyone had any similar experience? How did it go? In what terms have you engaged with the council?
All the best
Antonio
Good question, Antonio! It can be alarming when councillors & officers start referring to Transition Towns and you have to wonder what sort of understanding & expectations underly that! Anyway with our middle-sized (UK district) council we've had several shared initiatives - in both directions and a few setbacks.
IMO the vital step is to recognise that Transition groups and local authoritiess have interests and activities in common...
Experiences of dealing with local councils have been generally disappointing in my experience. Having represented "Transition" in discussions with Birmingham City, Derby City, South Derbyshire District, Derbyshire County Council, amongst others, it has mostly been a case of trying to find allies within the organisation who are prepared and able to make some headway and progress a Transition agenda. Mostly, it feels as if we haven't made much progress, even when there has been some willingness amongst several council officials.
Councils seem to be too set in their ways, too bureaucratic/slow moving, too self-centred, too unwilling to attempt anything differently or potentially outside their control, too paralysed by "job cuts" etc, too committed to wasting vast sums of money in the ways that they always have, for us to make much progress (or feel that we are making much progress!). They'll willingly hijack words and positive phrases to put into their endless strategy documents and meetings and claim all sorts of "green" progress but real action in support of community Transitioners or delivering real Transition actions ?
This does not mean that we give up ! Far from it. There are places and councils more enlightened and where they are asking for Transition help, we need to step up to the mark - without letting them drown us in their rhetoric. The Transition Training and Consulting team has been formed to work with local Transition groups to deliver professional insight and context for councils, businesses and other organisations that want to understand and adjust to 21st century realities.
Thanks Graham - I agree with your description as regards larger authorities. It seems that progress is most evident where the community and the council are small enough to know each other personally - as in a village's parish council.
It's timely that you mentioned the Transition Training and Consulting team. I'm just gathering contacts for a series of 'workshop' sessions in all district/borough areas of Hertfordshire. The idea is to assess and promote opportunities for local processing of surplus materials to divert them from central disposal. Each session will have a pair of speakers: the local Reuse/Recycling officer and a specialist from a 'waste' processing company capable of delivering community-scaled facilities. The basis of the approach is that Transition groups, local authorities and companies all have an interest in planning for 2015-2030-2050 so as to avoid 'locking in' what was acceptable in the past, for the foreseeable future.
As soon as there's a provisional schedule I'll post it in the Events and/or Training sections here. This has obvious relevance to TT&C and forming a Practitioners' Network.