We make transition! – Towards sustainable and resilient societies through empowered civil society and collaborative innovation

Project summary

Local and regional authorities have a crucial role in driving resilience – societal ability to adapt and react. Due to the complexity of sustainability challenges, there is a need to mobilise all levels of society to develop solutions that enable a needed change in our unsustainable practices. Various civil society actors – associations, social entrepreneurs, cooperatives, communities, individuals – can have a pioneering role in enhancing ecological and social sustainability.

We make transition! -project has engaged a great number of regional and local authorities, civil society, and small business actors in the Baltic Sea region. Partners from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany and Norway have cooperated with altogether 12 cities and municipalities in implementing local transition arena processes. Transition arena is a series of workshops including co-creation of a joint vision, pathways towards the vision, concrete actions and initiatives. The WMT! emphasis is on bottom-up approach, joint visioning and initiating concrete actions that are supported by the project. The arena topics are related to 1) sustainable lifestyle, 2) agriculture & food, 3) biodiversity and 4) circular & sharing economy.

The outcomes of the local processes include for example a sustainable food competency center (Trondheim), center of sustainable life (Tampere), a community of biodiversity promoters (Uusikaupunki), transformative education strategy (Lääne-Harju) and organic food transition in schools (Bremen and Vidzeme). The main output of the project is a manual for applying the transition management approach to make strategy processes such as climate plans, roadmaps, and local strategies more interactive involving different levels of society. The learnings from implemented arena processes in 12 locations are disseminated to local and regional authorities and other interested parties in the Baltic Sea region. 

The project is funded by the EU Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme.