The We make transition! – Towards Sustainable and Resilient Societies through Empowered Civil Society and Collaborative Innovation (2023-2025) -project aimed to enhance co-creation between local authorities, civil society and small business actors to foster sustainability and social innovations. The project used the principles of ‘transition arena method’ to enable bottom-up interaction, understanding of systemic challenges, and to initiate new transformative cooperation. The focus has been on empowering interaction and collaboration between local authorities, civil society and other small local actors, co-create joint sustainability visions, agree on and start implementing concrete actions towards a sustainable future.
We make transition! project partners from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany and Norway cooperated with 12 cities and municipalities in implementing local transition arena workshop processes. Transition arena is a series of workshops including co-creation of a joint vision, pathways towards the vision, concrete actions, and initiatives. Topics of the arena processes were related to 1) social sustainability, 2) agriculture & food, 3) biodiversity and 4) circular & sharing economy. The project has produced a manual for applying the transition arena method in practical way to enhance participation and cooperation between local authorities, civil society and business actors.
The We make transition! final event “Let’s keep doing sustainability transitions!” gathered 65 participants in Tampere, Finland in November 2025. The event included presentations on the project’s impact and showcased how WMT! project has created more space for discussions and engaged people to co-create local sustainability vision and concrete actions towards it. The event also provided insights on how local authorities can act as an enabler for an active civil society and empower social innovations that improve people’s well-being.
Keynote speaker Timo Huhtamäki is a circular economy transition expert and influencer who talked about the economic dilemmas of linear economy in a globalised market economy. In circular economy the revenues benefit the local economy as upcycling creates new jobs and services at local level. But there are a lot of systemic and culture-based challenges in the transition towards a circular economy.
The transition arena in Tampere “Tampere Future Arena of Sustainable Life” was organised in the autumn of 2024 and the results were implemented in 2025. The Tampere arena led into various concrete actions, including discussions on strengthening the visibility of second hand business in the city and a pilot “Culture Center of Sustainable Life” in the urban empty space “Kaleva Hall”.
Tiina Leinonen from the City of Tampere presented the impacts of Tampere transition arena:
“The greatest thing was the involvement of politicians from all parties all the way. The arena gave space to listen, agree and launch new cooperation with local actors, which was integrated also in the new Mayor’s programme.”
