Transition Culture

28 Apr 2014

Michael Shuman: "I would say that we are winning"

We last spoke to Michael Shuman just over three years ago. He is author of several books on local economic development, the most recent being Local Dollars, Local Sense. He is an attorney, an economist, and his current job title is Director of Community Portals for Mission Markets. Not every day you meet one of those. As someone who knows more about economic localisation than most, I was keen to pick Michael’s brains on the impact he sees it as having, and how Transition initiatives pushing in that direction might be able to measure the impact they are having.

Our theme this month is about the impact that Transition has had. From where you sit, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition has had as a movement, as an approach?

There’s two ways that I would look at that. One way is Transition as an idea and the other way is Transition as an organisation. I think Transition as an idea has been tremendously effective. In the United States it has many different names. Some of it comes from the Post-Carbon Institute, some of it just comes from the environmental community, some of it comes from BALLE and other organisations. But the idea that the global economy has become unreliable and that we need to rebuild our community economies from the ground up has taken hold everywhere.

I don’t travel to a lot of places around the world, but maybe to a dozen countries, and every single one of those countries that I have gone to including developing countries like Brazil, there is evidence of this Transition underway. A couple of years ago I did a study for the Gates Foundation called Community Food Enterprises where we looked at 24 examples of great local food businesses. Half of them were outside the United States. In every one of these countries that we looked at there was an interesting profound localisation movement taking place.

The second part of the question is Transition as an organisation. To what extent are people using Transition materials as opposed to other things? My sense is that Transition is very strong in Canada and Australia and through much of Europe. I don’t see Transition having quite as much visibility in most of the United States yet, or having as much visibility in places like Japan or a lot of developing countries. But I think that’s changing and I appreciate there’s only so many hours in the day and you guys are working as hard as you can to get the message out.

A lot of your work, and increasingly a lot of what we do at Transition Network, is about trying to model and communicate and show in practice how localisation is a form of economic development, and is as valid, if not more valid, than the current approach. Where are we at, do you think, in that pursuit of being able to model and argue and present the case that localisation and more resilient local economies are a form of economic development?

I mostly follow evidence inside the United States and from that I would say that we are winning. There’s just been study after study that’s come out showing that localisation is good for job growth and good for per capita income growth, good for reducing poverty and good for environmental restoration, good for resilience. It is much easier, I think, to identify the small number of holes that remain in the localisation argument than to talk about all the good things that are happening.

Michael Shuman

I’ll give you an example. There was a nice study that came out from the Federal Reserve of Atlanta last August that looked at hundreds of counties across the United States. It performed a very empirically rigorous analysis and found that those counties with the highest density of local and small business were those that actually had the highest level of per capita income growth and were doing the best job of reducing poverty. Which is quite an extraordinary finding.

It’s extraordinary because there’s also a whole bunch of data that says that the wages paid by smaller businesses are lower, a little bit lower than those of larger businesses. The question of causality, the question of how these two facts ought to be related to one another is an interesting one.

Among the things that I think about are that at the end of the day, even with somewhat lower wages, local businesses spending more money locally are generating higher economic multipliers that generate more healthy public sectors that come back to people in other ways. That’s one way of thinking about it.

Another way of thinking about it is that the wage gap may in fact be narrowing. There is some evidence of this although I would like to look at the data again. The last time I looked at this data was maybe 5 or 6 years ago. Generally speaking, larger businesses paid more specifically because unionised manufacturing plants had significantly higher wages for the average worker. Most of these plants have moved overseas.

Instead, what has taken their place in a lot of US cities is Walmarts and large-scale retail which pays very, very low wages. That’s contributing to the shrinkage of the gap. But probably the most important thing, and this is where I think the research that we do is going to be very important, is that we’ve got to start a segment about where wages are better or worse. One of the things that we will soon find is that businesses that take on a set of socially responsible standards, that are mindful about environment, and mindful about labour actually do wind up paying better wages than the typical small business.

In my mind what that means is that localisation, part of the reasonable localisation agenda must be to educate smaller, newer businesses about the importance of embracing these higher labour and environmental standards in their day to day operations.

Where do you stand on the debates about what’s possible in terms of the political change that can be leveraged from the local scale? Some people say climate change, peak oil, these are huge global issues and they can only be solved through concerted international effort and that anything you do at the local scale is irrelevant and not making any kind of a difference. What meaningful change can local communities leverage, do you think?

Shuman I think local communities can have a huge impact and I say this not to disparage or discount the importance of other approaches that are national or global. But I think there is a very strong case to be made for local action on global problems. For the first 10 years or so of my professional life after I graduated from law school, I ran an organisation called the Centre for Innovative Diplomacy. We had several thousand mayors and council members, primarily in the United States, that we were educating about the impacts of so-called municipal foreign policy and how and why it ought to be done.

One of the first things that we did was we held a conference called SPA, the Stratosphere Protection Accord. I believe it was in 1996 but we brought together about 2 dozen American and Canadian cities that basically have the chutzpah to put together a treaty on ozone depletion issues. The treaty outlined certain goals that the mayors involved in this treaty would implement in their own communities with respect to the emission of halons and chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs). That treaty, I believe, was a rough draft of the Montreal Protocol because that treaty led to a lot of other cities beginning to take initiatives on CFCs. It translated into profound political impact in the United States because there was a debate early on about federal standards with respect to CFCs and some of the national environmental community was prepared to basically sell out local initiatives by having federal standards that were, in the locals’ view, weak, pre-empt, that is override, the local standards.

There was a huge political fight and because of the clout of the mayors, that compromise failed. Instead, states and localities were allowed to take on tougher standards and then Montreal ultimately took place under the Bush 1 administration and I think it has been, while not a perfect accord, a pretty good accord on that issue.

In my mind, without local action, this never would have happened. I feel like we’re seeing a lot of local action now on carbon reduction. In some ways it’s a tougher issue than the ozone depletion issue because at least as I understand from pollsters and sociologists, that carbon is invisible and viewed as a benign gas makes it less fearsome than, say, CFCs which are very much chemical and not part of the day to day environment. So that’s one of the additional things that we’re up against. Plus the organised opposition of climate deniers is so much deeper, better funded, more entrenched than with the CFC manufacturers, so that’s another thing we’re up against.

But that said, I think every city ought to try to pursue this agenda as far and as deep as possible, share its successes with other communities and this is the way I think national change will finally take place.

If you’re a group such as a Transition group who are actively working to build resilience, localise the economy, what would you argue would be the best ways to measure the impact you’re having? What indicators would you be looking at?’

There’s a bunch of ways of thinking about the problem. Let’s start at the very top and most general level. In my view, there are three basic criteria for a successful localised economy:

To maximise the percentage of jobs in locally-owned business
To maximise local self-reliance
To maximise the deployment and spread of high labour and environmental standards

There are tools that one can use on each of these criteria. So for the percentage of jobs in locally-owned business, I don’t know what the databases look like in the UK, but in the United States really down to the zip-code level we can get a pretty good picture of the number of jobs in different sizes of business in different sectors of the economy. We have 1100 sectors that we measure, so a very high level of detail and then we look at how many of those jobs are in self-employed businesses, how many of one to five persons and all the way up to very big businesses.

Interviewer and interviewee. New York, October 2013.

And so because we know that something like 99.9% of all businesses with fewer than 500 employees are locally owned, it’s easy to make a good determination of local ownership. It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s pretty good. What one can then see is year by year, the percentage of jobs in locally owned businesses has expanded.

On the second criterion, on self-reliance, this is where leakage analysis is very important. In the United States for BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, I developed a set of calculators that you basically plug in a county or zip code and you can instantly see what your level of self-reliance is in every one of 1100 sectors. I worked for BALLE a couple of years ago. When I left BALLE, they did not upkeep the tool and so we’re now trying to basically transfer the tool back to me and then I will upgrade them and try to make it available again.

One can clearly do these kinds of leakage calculations in a very expensive way using input-output computer programmes. Again in the United States, in order to use them and do a calculation for a community probably is going to cost anything from 1-10 thousand dollars. The whole idea behind the BALLE calculators is we’ll give you slightly less accurate estimates about how your sectors are performing in terms of self-reliance but it’ll cost you $20 instead of $1000.

That still is an objective of mine and we can talk more specifically about the methodology of doing that. But I think broadly speaking it can be done, it should be done and when you start looking at those numbers year by year, you start to see these are the sectors we’re becoming more self-reliant in, these are the sectors we’re losing self-reliance in and you can start measuring what your progress is. Obviously the goal here is to increase your level of self-reliance in as many sectors as possible but particularly those sectors, I would argue that are closest to basic human needs like housing, energy, food and health.

The last criterion about social responsibility – you know there’s a bunch of tools that are out there to measure companies triple bottom-line performance. Among them the B corporation measurement gears. I’ve seen an article recently that said they’ve counted something like 500 of these tools out there which means that it’s a very tricky enterprise to know which tool to use and which is going to give you the best information for your community.

I have a very simple standard, which is how many of your businesses are using any tool whatsoever to get feedback on their triple bottom line performance? Just measuring that in the community and seeing if one can press that one indicator higher will give you a fairly good sense of where you’re making progress on this third criterion. As I said, that’s the highest level. Underneath there one can then start to look at specific sectors: energy, food, health again, and look at specific indicators of progress or lack of progress around localisation.

The one thing that I would just say for focus on the Transition movement is that the most serious mistake that people make on indicators is they raise a bundle of money to do a terrific indicators report in year one and they are never able to do it again, to raise that amount of money again in years two, three etc. It’s really important, I think, in the short run, to use readily available data already compiled by the government or other private entities that’s not expensive and develop indicators around that.

Might an additional one to that be something around inward investment and the degree to which the community is mobilising and able to bring investment into these projects?

Yes, and in fact with the BALLE calculators we actually have three types of calculators. The first is the one that I described to you which is overall leakage, but it’s mostly about leakage of consumption dollars. Because US databases for weird historic reasons don’t measure farming and some of the food sector in the rest of the economy, we have a second food calculator using those specific data. And then our third calculator is around capital.

Now, again speaking for the United States, we have very good data on local banking and also the performance of non-local banks in re-investing in community, and this is because of a law that we passed in the 1960s called the Community Re-investment Act. Unfortunately banking…if you add together all forms of banking in the United States it’s about 8 trillion dollars. But if you add together all forms of long-term investment that people have in stocks, funds, pension funds, mutual funds and insurance funds that’s 30 trillion dollars. So that’s more than three times larger than what the banking capital is. And we have no data whatsoever, national, local, regional on how that money flows.

Just through logical deduction, one can see how almost none of that money has any local contact whatsoever. That is, when you put money in stocks and the stocks are all traded on a global stock exchange, all that money is non-local. This would be an area at least again for the United States that I would like to see at least States, if not the Federal government, try to compile more data, household by household so we can get a better handle on the movement of capital.

What we’re seeing, and you capture it beautifully in your most recent book, is new models emerging around local currencies, around local investment, new community energy company models and new food models. What kind of meaningful support would make a difference to these really being able to flower, do you think? At the moment they really just have to get going under their own steam and raise money wherever they can philanthropically. What would meaningful support in terms of finance, in terms of peer to peer, in terms of skills and so on that would really mean that this could gain some traction, do you think?

The theory that I think many of us have been working on in the United States is that if we can change the law that currently makes it difficult and expensive for the 99% of investors who are so-called unaccredited, that is not wealthy, if we make it easier for that 99% to put any money into local business, we will set in motion a whole bunch of changes in behaviour and institutions that will begin to shift money away from bigger business to smaller business.

Just so that folks have a sense of the scale of this, again, the number of our long-term investment is 30 trillion dollars. I would estimate that more than half of our economy is in locally-owned business. That means there is a fundamental misallocation of capital. Every single American is investing in Fortune 500 publicly traded companies and under-investing, that is not investing at all in local small business. If we can fix the laws that have led to this misallocation, I think something like 15 trillion dollars will move, not immediately but over time, from Wall Street to Main Street. That movement will have profound impacts in two ways. One way is because you’re putting a lot of new capital into promising resilient businesses at the community level, but the other way is that you are pulling money out of all these businesses that are doing lots of environmental harm in the world.

What people have not appreciated is that poor or outdated structure of securities laws is responsible for the single biggest subsidy that goes into unsustainable business. By reforming these laws we are beginning to dismantle that subsidy to large-scale, global unsustainable business.

Changing the law is not enough for individual behaviour. That’s why in Local Dollars, Local Sense and other things that I’ve written, I try to point out a whole bunch of very specific tools that people can use to begin to localise their money. But the problem is really twofold right now. One problem is that it takes a lot of work and energy to be a successful local investor and people just don’t have the time and the ability to do that. We haven’t made it easy enough for people yet.

The second problem is that in the big scheme of things, creating a local investment revolution really requires four different kinds of changes. To just run through them briefly, first you have to make it easier and cheaper for the average person to put money into a local business. So that means you have to make it easier and cheaper for that business to issue stock or debt notes or other forms of security.

The second thing you have to do is you have to make it easier and cheaper for people, once they buy these securities to sell them again so that they have some value. Everyone needs to cash out at some point.

The third thing we need to do is to make it easier and cheaper for to put these securities in a pool so they can create diversified portfolios of local business, because otherwise the types of investments people have are too risky.

And then the fourth thing to do is to make it possible and easy forthose who run large-scale investment institutions on behalf of big numbers of people; pension fund managers, people who run foundations, people who run university endowments, people who run big church chunks of money, you have to change the rules to make it possible for them to put money into these local businesses.

The thing about the way the law works in this area is that these things follow sequentially, which is to say as an institutional manager you cannot justify putting money into a local fund, i.e. a fund of local securities, unless it actually has a performance record of several years to show that it is doing pretty well and has a good rate of return. You cannot run a local fund unless you have the ability to buy and sell securities on a local exchange. And you cannot run a local exchange until you have a critical mass of local securities.

In the Unites States, and my sense is that this is also true in the UK, we are really at step one. We are at stage one now of making it easier and cheaper for people to buy securities. We still have a lot of work to do on that, but we have to then sequentially go through these other steps and it’s going to take a while to do that in terms of both legal and institution building. We’re talking about a process here that’s going to take at least 5 to 10 years to fundamentally reshape the investment environment.

When I last spoke to you, I asked you something like “what advice would you give people involved in Transition who would like to be as effective as possible in their local economy?” and your advice was “go to business school”. As somebody pointed out in the comments afterwards, if you went to business school nowadays the chances are what you would be learning is neo-liberal growth-based economics. If you were to design the Michael Shuman business school one-year diploma, what would that course cover? What do you think are the things that people would need to learn from an enlightened business school?

Well it’s not hypothetical, in the sense that I’ve been working with some wonderful people at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver to design and test out different modules for this programme. Some of what needs to be taught is sustainable micro and macro economics from a sustainability perspective. Some of it is looking at the topics of growing business but from a perspective of either triple bottom line for-profit business or triple bottom line social enterprise, which is usually non-profit.

But you could go through the process of how do you do financial statements, how do you do cash flow, how do you think about raising capital, how do you manage a workforce successfully, how do you do marketing. So all these things are important topics but it’s important to teach case studies of successful social enterprise or triple bottom line for profits, particularly small-scale triple bottom line for profits so that people can carry those lessons into their work.

I also think that economic development which is a topic that’s a little bit different than how to run your own business, but what can a community or what can a government do as a way of nurturing business. I think that also can and should be taught in a fundamentally different way. The new book that I am working on right now is called Reinventing Economic Development and one of the messages that I try to convey is that even as we are undertaking programmes in Transition towns around our style of economic development, it’s important to figure out models that pay for themselves.

For example, one can conceive of lots of ways of doing a ‘buy local’ programme. One way of doing it is campaigns, signs on billboards and buses and putting all kinds of messages out there to the general public. Unfortunately that costs money, and that money usually has to be fronted by government or foundation grants.

What I think is a better approach is you might undertake say a local loyalty card or a local debit card, and those cards have a business structure underlying them, so you’re really accomplishing the same thing, only you figure out a way to self-finance. I would include in that promoting entrepreneurship, raising local capital, developing partnerships among local businesses so they’re more competitive. These activities can be reframed in revenue-generating ways that allow them to be self-financing and grow, and also in a way to insulate themselves from the inevitable changes of government.

What we see in the United States is that economic development programmes yo-yo as various governments come in and out and it’s just a very unstable environment for doing anything. So getting a bunch of more modest small-scale, self-financing programmes supporting local business is a much better way of doing economic development. That’s part of what I’d want to teach as well.

Lastly, what’s your sense of what a tipping point looks like? You said at the beginning that your sense is that as an argument localisation is winning. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s really hard to know whether things are moving or whether they’re not moving. The thing with tipping points really is you can only see them with hindsight I guess?

There’s probably a bunch of them. The one that I think about the most goes back to this shift of money from global companies, of investment capital from global companies to local companies. Because the level of misallocation of capital is so profound and frankly complete right now, I think that once people begin to figure out how to shift money into local business, that could proceed very, very quickly.

In the United States, as I’ve argued, there will probably be a 15 trillion dollar shift over time, from Wall Street to Main Street. The first trillion dollar move hasn’t happened, won’t happen for a while. But when the first trillion dollars moves, people are going to notice, and one of the ways people are going to notice is that when there’s less capital chasing global companies, the value of those companies is going to go down. As more capital chases local businesses, the value of those companies is going to go up.

As that happens, people will take notice. People who are sitting on the fence, saying they still don’t see the evidence that local businesses are that successful or profitable. But when people start seeing those data, I think others will start to move their money. And so the next trillion moves, and another and another until all 15 moves. That inflection point will be an extremely important movement.

Hard to know when it happens, but capital moves very quickly, as countries like Argentina have realised to their peril. I think capital exiting out of Wall Street could happen very quickly and when you start to see articles about people fleeing the mainstream markets, of course many of those articles will be put in terms of panic, that’s when we’ll know that what we are doing has really taken hold.

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Categories: Originally posted on Transition Network

25 Apr 2014

Transition Streets: growing success for communities to conserve energy

Gail Jackson (fourth from left) with the rest of the Riverside Road group in St

Here is the second of my monthly pieces for the Guardian’s Live Better Challenge:

When Gail Jackson put an invitation through every door on her street in St Albans, inviting her neighbours round to her house to discuss doing Transition Streets, she didn’t really expect any of them to come. “I ended up with 11 people crammed into my front room. I didn’t know what to do with so many people,” she recalls. She showed them a two-minute video about this community-level green initiative, and asked if they would like to try it on the street. Everyone put their names down. “When do we start?” they said.

The government’s flagship Green Deal has proven a flop, with 150,000 assessments turning into less than 1,000 people actually taking up the offer of a loan for energy-efficiency measures. “A more effective Green Deal rollout would have started from the bottom rather than the top,”commented Andrew Dobson, professor of politics at Keele University. That informal, tea-fuelled get-together in Gill’s front room offers a powerful taste of what a genuine national push for energy conservation might look like.

Transition Streets began in Totnes in Devon, after the town was selected as one of 10 low-carbon communities by the Department of Energy and Climate Change in late 2010. It went on to win the prestigious 2011 Ashden award for behaviour change. Neighbours get together on their streets, meet seven times in each other’s homes, work through an information pack, and take practical steps to reduce their energy, water use, travel and so on.

In Totnes, around 550 households have taken part, in 63 groups. Each household has, on average, reduced its carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes, saving around £570 a year on household bills. Over half of those involved were on low incomes. Yet a detailed evaluation of its impact found that the key benefit that people identified was feeling more connected to their neighbours. Many had so much fun they went on to set up other projects, such as a community cinema. Greg Barker, minister for energy and climate change, visited the town and enthused about Transition Streets, saying “community engagement and personal engagement are clearly the key”.

From Totnes, Transition Streets has spread. It is happening in Wiltshire, Dorset, Herefordshire and Berkshire. It is being rolled out by local government in Brittany. In Australia, Transition Newcastle’s Transition Streets Challenge was recognised in the New South Wales Sustainable City awards. In January this year, Suffolk Coastal district council announced it would be funding Transition Streets locally. This week the Belgian lottery funded a substantial rollout of it there. It was also mentioned as best practice in the government’s recent Community Energy Strategy.

Ten Transition Streets groups ran in St Albans in 2013, and the plan is to do the same this year, to engage another 200 people. Its first year was funded by Big Lottery, and this year by the Co-operative and local councillors. St Albans is also the first place to be running Transition Streets in a school, the local Sir John Laws School.

From Jackson’s experience, why does she think it works? “I love the community aspect,” she says. “I love working with neighbours to get results. People loved meeting in each others’ houses. It provided a focus in order for us to get together and it built relationships that continue”.

On a street, most people have the same kind of houses, and therefore the same challenges in terms of insulation, the same recycling challenges, the same sized gardens, the same immediate neighbourhood issues. A more top-down approach is unlikely to produce such shared interests.

What impact has Transition Streets had in St Albans? An evaluation conducted at the end of the first year found that, among other things, participants had carried out insulation and other energy-efficiency measures, installed double glazing, reduced shower times, recycled more, and started growing food, cycling and walking more. Participants saved around £380 a year and 0.8 tonnes of CO2. One participant said: “It helps you have a sense of wellbeing and community, and helps you appreciate the street a bit more.

Can anyone do it? According to Jackson, all you need is “a small group and a small bit of funding”. The small amount needed fits neatly with the starter level of grant support offered by Awards for All, which has enabled many Transition Streets initiatives to get started.

Could the government decide to roll it out nationally? Its power though comes from the fact that it is genuinely bottom-up and led by the communities themselves. “It would be a bit scary to think of government getting their hands on it,” Jackson says. “It’s a solid, old-style community engagement technique, and as a way of meeting government aims it’s perfect. But it needs to come from a community base”.

Find out more about Transition Streets here.

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Categories: Originally posted on Transition Network

25 Apr 2014

The Impact We’re Having: Anthony Woolhouse on the West Solent Solar Cooperative

“And God said, “Let there be light” and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected…”

Spike Milligan

We hope to do better…. We have created the West Solent Solar Co-operative to generate renewable energy for, and by, the local community. The solar farm we are building will generate enough electricity for about 600 local households. It will produce in the region of 2.5 GWh each year and cost about £2.5 million to build. It will save Hampshire approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year.

The project started with an idea about a year ago. A search for a suitable site in the area identified a 12.65 acre field in Lower Pennington, Near Lymington and about half a mile from the sea, opposite the Isle of Wight. It has been recently restored after a decade of use, initially for gravel extraction and then for burying construction waste. A board member has purchased the field and leased it to the West Solent Solar Co-op for 25 years, with an option to extend it for another 10 years.

Six members of the board of West Solent Solar Co-op live in the New Forest area. There is a strong Transition influence with five directors being New Forest Transition members. There is significant Quaker input too. Between them, the directors have a broad range of skills and experience, including engineering, planning, new business creation, sustainability (including working for the London 2012 sustainability team), business management, film-making and legal. All these have been put to good use.

There were no objections to our application for planning permission and we received lots of support from many local people, including New Forest Transition, Friends of the Earth, and Quaker and other like-minded networks. We received planning permission in early December 2013.

Early in the project we applied to our electricity network operator, Scottish & Southern Energy for a budget estimate for the grid connection. We applied for 2.7MWp and were offered 2.0MWp. We discovered by talking to other solar farms that the convention is to install 20% additional capacity and cap the output at the grid connection limit. This we have done and we are installing 2.4MWp of solar panels.

The RooFit team at Ofgem were incredibly helpful and we managed to obtain pre-accreditation on the 31^st December 2013. This means that the Feed in Tariff rate that prevailed then is reserved for us for 6 months, avoiding the real risk that the FiT rate falls while the project develops. We therefore need to build the solar farm and connect to the grid by the 30^thJune 2014.

To help raise the necessary funds to build the solar farm, we are working with Energy4All, a not-for-profit company based in Barrow-in-Furness who have raised similar sums of money for eight wind co-ops. We are their first solar project.

We financed the early part of the project with our own resources and despite applying to funds such as the Rural Communities Renewable Energy Fund we discovered that the New Forest is considered to be urban and we did not qualify! Energy4All has a linked fund, Energy Prospects, which lent us the money to secure the grid connection. We have since repaid this loan.

In February 2014, we offered the 50 initial members of our co-op the opportunity to invest under the Government’s Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS). The limit for this scheme is a total of £150k and happily we were oversubscribed.

The main fund raising effort began on March 18^th with the objective of raising £2.46 million, including c.10% from a five-year community bond. We set a minimum investment level of £1.3 million shares and £160k of bonds to build a 1.2MWp solar plant. If we did not raise this we would return all the money subscribed. We were delighted to pass the minimum investment level on April 15^th and total funds passed the £2 million mark just after the Easter break.

We have been fortunate in many respects. For example, the BBC picked up the story, and published it on their website. This was followed by a television interview on the BBC South Today local news programme and an outside broadcast interview on BBC Radio Solent. These interviews were incredibly helpful in raising local awareness of our project and stimulated a significant and immediate increase in the number of visits to our website.

We have chosen Solarcentury to build the solar farm and they will start work on May 8^th and connect to the grid by June 28^th, two days ahead of our FiT deadline. Scottish & Southern Energy has already built their sub-station.

map

We have started to implement our planting programme with volunteers from the local community planting almost 1,000 hedgerow trees provided by the Woodland Trust. The hedge will eventually go right round the site providing a valuable wildlife corridor. We will plant a wild flower meadow right around the perimeter of the panels and also between the panels. We will place beehives on the site and probably arrange for sheep to graze the site in the autumn.

The Met Office map (right) shows that we are located in an area of the UK, which receives the greatest annual hours of sunlight, and therefore an ideal location for a solar farm.

This project is the result of the local community working together. More information can be found on our website www.westsolentsolar.coop or by phoning us on 0845 373 3612.

Anthony Woolhouse, Chairman, with Jonathan Blease, Kate Chapman and Cathy Cook, all New Forest Transition members and Directors of the West Solent Solar Cooperative.

Update just before we posted this piece:

“Could you add a small note to our story that today we reached our fundraising goal of £2.46 million and have therefore ended our share drive and closed the books for new share applications. Very exciting! We will start construction in the coming weeks, so that we have can have everything installed and up and running by the end of June.

Congratulations from everyone at Transition Network…

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Categories: Originally posted on Transition Network

24 Apr 2014

Katrina Brown on resilience, impact and learning

Katrina Brown is a Professor of Social Sciences based at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at Exeter University. The three key themes her research centres on are Resilience, Vulnerability and Development, Dynamics of Change in Coastal Social Ecological-Systems and People, Poverty and Carbon. As someone who has published papers about community resilience, I was interested, in the context of this month’s theme, in her thoughts on impact, resilience, and how we might measure it.

So, Kate,you’re in a lift and you’ve got three floors to explain what resilience is. What’s your resilience ‘elevator pitch’?

Resilience is about the capacity of a system to be able to respond to change. That might be an ecological system, it might be a social ecological system. The way in which I understand resilience is applied to a social ecological system, so to an integrated system. Resilience covers not only the ability to be able to persist and to bounce back after even extreme events or sudden shocks, but it’s also the ability to learn from and respond and bounce back better, to positively develop in response to a whole range of different changes, some of which might be slow onset changes, background drivers, large-scale drivers, but within the context of a range of different changes.

You note in a recent paper that there is a sharp increase in interest in resilience among social scientists. Why is that? What does resilience add to previous debates do you think?

I think that resilience is helpful because it enables us to look more holistically at systems, integrated social ecological systems, and it enables us to consider the impacts of a range of different types of changes, and to consider those in conditions where the future is highly uncertain. It’s part of this consciousness of living in uncertain and risky times, and I think that resilience is a very helpful concept for understanding change and our societal and environmental responses to change within that context.

Does resilience deepen or undermine the concept of sustainable development?

It can probably do either. For me, I find resilience a very useful concept in thinking about sustainability. It contributes towards my reflections and understanding of sustainability because I think that it puts change within this broader context of thinking about sustainable development, about progress or whatever. It’s a really helpful underpinning concept that can contribute towards an understanding of sustainability.

You write in one of the papers that you sent that “resilience centralises climate change as the defining feature of local government and governance.” But are we also seeing resilience, do you think, being used increasingly as a tool by climate sceptics? After the floods the term resilience seems increasingly being used as a way to reinforce business as usual rather than to question it.

Certainly that’s a finding from my own research as well. I think resilience as a concept can be used and applied in many different ways. We saw similar things with sustainable development. There is this aspect of resilience which is used in a very conservative way. It’s used or interpreted as means of staying the same, of resisting change. There is that aspect to resilience which is about actually resisting change. There is this very different tension to resisting ideas around resilience which for me, as an academic, make it all the more interesting.

But it means that as a concept it is very widely adopted and applied in a whole range of different settings and by a whole range of different people from social movements like the Transition movement to state agencies when we’re talking to responses to flooding and building resilience. So yes, resilience is used in many different contexts and in many different ways by lots of different people.

This month we’re looking at impact and measurement for Transition. You wrote that “there has been a shift away from the notion that the central concepts of adaptive capacity, resilience and wellbeing can be objectively measured by a set of quantifiable indicators to a much more nuanced view that understands them as comprising subjective relational as well as objective aspects.” What do you mean by that and what are your thoughts on how Transition initiatives can measure whether their work is or isn’t making their community more resilient?

There’s always a tendency to try and reduce these concepts like vulnerability, adaptive capacity and resilience to a set of straightforward objective measurable indicators. But actually a lot of the literature and a lot of the research shows that there’s a whole set of subjective dimensions to resilience or vulnerability. So actually how a person feels about their own capacity and their own abilities, their own efficacy, which are hugely important in determining how they might be able to respond, and that also translates to a community scale as well and to a collective scale. We always should be looking across the objective and the subjective aspects in trying to assess how resilient a community or how resilient a society or a system might be.

I suppose some things like Transition would be coming at resilience from a mitigation perspective, seeing resilience as a tool for mitigation whereas it’s all too increasingly seen as an adaptation tool. How do you see that balance between mitigation and adaptation in terms of climate and resilience?

Both are extremely important and I think that resilience applies just as well to thinking about how we build capacity to adapt as to how we build capacity to mitigate. The way that we think of resilience as a concept applies to both. If we start looking at resilience as a much more proactive capacity, to be able to self organise, to learn and to actually develop in a more sustainable way then it becomes a really key concept in thinking about mitigation.

I wonder from your perspective, as somebody who studies the field of community resilience, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition and the way that it interprets and works with the idea of resilience has had over the last 7 or 8 years?

I can’t talk that specifically about the Transition movement as it’s not my area of expertise, but from what I know about the Transition movement, in terms of some of these core capacities that you might think of as having been developed, around the capacity to self-organise, around building social capital in different ways, this idea about doing stuff together which builds a whole set of capacities at a community scale, I think those are really important.

How that then feeds into building competencies around community action, around building these sort of reflexive and problem solving skills that might happen as a result of doing stuff together. And then I suppose building a set of capacities which are about co-creating collectively a vision of the future and setting that within a context of a political strategy would be the things that I would have thought would be really important and the kinds of areas where you could identify impact within the Transition movement.

You’ve written about how mainstream resilience thinking often places the emphasis on individual responsibility for coping, that actually the lack of resilience is somehow your inability to cope and seeing it in the context of how we contribute to economic success rather than social wellbeing. You talk about shifting the emphasis from positive adaptation despite adversity to positive adaptation to adversity. What’s your sense of that in terms of the social justice aspects and inclusion aspects around resilience?

This is an area that’s really starting to come to the fore in debates around resilience. It’s an area which, from the academic and scientific perspective is only just starting to be integrated and there’s a lot of debate around how do we understand the dynamics within resilience, for example.

When we start looking beyond these individual capacities and thinking about resilience as something that is vested, a characteristic of an individual to actually this much more dynamic view of collective and community resilience, then all of these issues to do with whose resilience, whose voice, who defines resilience, who defines these visions for the future become incredibly important. Then of course we come back to real core social science ideas, as you say around social justice, around inclusion, participation and so on.

My own background is in international development and I think there’s really important research and track record of findings from international development which has looked at these issues which we have to now start integrating into our understanding of resilience. It’s an under-researched area but of course it’s an area of paramount importance.

In one of your papers you ask the question “how much adversity should resilient individuals endure before social arrangements rather than individuals are targeted for intervention?” What are your thoughts on that?

There are two aspects to that. The first is an issue that you alluded to in an earlier question, which is this idea that resilience can be used in this very conservative sense and in a way it can be used to say – well individuals are very resilient, and it can be seen as part of the retreat of the state and responsibility for supporting individuals and communities after particular events. There’s that sort of danger and there’s quite a lot of writing in the community psychology literature which talks about the dangers that are inherent in resilience thinking in that respect.

But secondly, there’s again this tension between how we understand the role of structural elements in supporting resilience, either in individuals or communities compared to the individual’s characteristics. It’s that debate about structure in agency really which is part of an ongoing discussion within the social sciences which is how can resilience be supported and enhanced through external infrastructure, external interventions, compared to how much is it built through individuals’ capacities. So I think that there’s an important tension and discussion around that. How much is resilience the responsibility of governments or other agencies, compared to how much does it have to come from within communities and individuals?

You mentioned earlier on about how one of the aspects of resilience is about learning and the ability to learn and reflect in that way. What’s your sense of, as somebody who works in higher education, of what our education system designed to produce people with the best skills for resilience would look like? Does it look like it looks like today or what would our education system look like if it produced individuals and professionals who were a resilient and grounded in resilience as they could be?

That’s a hugely challenging question. One of the key issues for me as somebody who works in the university system is how we get our students engaged with the real world and engaged with the communities within which they live and the communities within which our universities exist. It’s something that our institute in Cornwall, the Environment and Sustainability Institute is trying really hard to do, is to form much more meaningful partnerships in a whole range of stakeholders in the community in which we exist, so that our research can actually speak more directly to the needs of stakeholders.

Our students can work alongside and in partnership with our stakeholders within the community. I think that’s extremely important. It’s important in terms of how our research can actually address real-life issues, it’s important in terms of how we understand ourselves not only as educators but as citizens and I think that it’s also incredibly important for enhancing the experience that our students get out of their studies.

The important thing for me is to think about resilience as this multi-dimensional concept which is used by many different people which has opportunities within it, and which can be used, as the Transition movement is using it, in this radical and very dynamic sense as opposed to the conservative, the staying the same, the persisting sense in which it’s very often applied more popularly.

Discussion: Comments Off on Katrina Brown on resilience, impact and learning

Categories: Originally posted on Transition Network

23 Apr 2014

The impact of Transition. In numbers.

Here’s something we’d love your help with. How can we capture the impact of Transition in numbers? We’ve done our best with what we can find, and we’d love to know what you would add from your local initiative. Any numbers you can put to your impact? Number of meetings? Amount of funding? Amount raised in a share option? Number of carrots grown on a train station? It’s over to you. Let us know (use the comments box below), and we’ll publish the final version at the end of the month…

The Impact of Transition in numbers
Number of countries with active TIs	44
Number of Transition initiatives registered with Transition Network	1,130
Number of initiatives in Japan registered with Transition Network	5
Number of initiatives in Japan registered on national Japanese Transition site	40
Percentage of those involved in Transition who are women	58% ⁴
Subscribers to the Transition Network newsletter in March 2014	17,929
Subscribers to the Transition Network newsletter in January 2011	9,309
Number of people who have done Transition Training in the UK and US	3,637
Percentage of those still active in Transition 4 years after doing Transition Training	86%
Number of UK pupils who have been involved in Transition Network’s Schools in Transition pilot	Over 3,700
Percentage of Bristol Mayor George Ferguson’s salary paid in Bristol Pounds	100%
Number of members of the EU’s Economic & Social Committee who spent a day with their local Transition initiative	19 (all of them)
Percentage of TIs considering themselves “very” or “fairly successful”	75.7% ¹
Number of times ‘Transition’ appears in UK government’s ‘Community Energy Strategy’ (2014)	10
Number of Transition Trainers in the world	137 in 25 countries
Number of initiatives in Brazil registered with Transition Network	4
Number of initiatives in Brazil registered on national Brazilian Transition site	61
Number of people involved in the average successful TI	189.5 ¹
Transition Network’s Twitter followers	13,500
Percentage of TIs that are legally constituted	64% ¹
Theme most frequently tackled by TIs	Food ¹
Amount raised through share launch by Transition Bath/Corsham’s community energy company (Bath & West Community Energy)	£750,000
Amount West Solent Solar Co-op (set up by New Forest Transition) is seeking to raise through shares for a community solar farm	£2,200,000
Average percentage of TI core group members who’ve done Transition Training	3 ¹
Turnover of 20 highly replicable Transition-oriented enterprises identified by the REconomy Project	£3.5m
Number of people they employ between them	109
Number of national Transition hubs formulating a strategy to support REconomy type activity in their country	7
Outside temperature that didn’t put off 100 people from attending the first ever Latvian REconomy event	20 below
Percentage of TIs who think they are “not good at diversity”	55.9% ¹
Number of initiatives in Sweden registered with Transition Network	7
Number of initiatives in Sweden registered on national Swedish Transition site	192
Amount of CO2 saved per household by Transition Streets participants in Totnes	1.2 tonnes ⁵
Number of households in the town that took part	550 ⁵
Amount of Google returns for the term ‘Transition Town’ (although some will also be people who live in towns and are undergoing gender realignment)	75,800,000
Number of times 2013 Guardian article about Transition was shared through social media	Over 10,000
Number of weeks The Power of Just Doing Stuff was No 1. In the Guardian Bookstores best sellers list	2
Number of times In Transition 2.0 was viewed on YouTube in its first 6 weeks there	26,000 ⁶
Number of page views on TransitionNetwork.org during 12 months up to March 2013.	1,182,360
Number of downloads for Transition Network’s 3 recent Economic Evaluation reports	4,922
Percentage of people for whom Transition is their first experience of activism	32% ²
Number of States in the US where Transition is active	37
Number of languages in which In Transition 2.0 is subtitled.	22 ⁶
Number of UK local currency schemes inspired through Transition	6
Bank of England’s estimate of amount of local currencies in circulation in the UK	£385,000
And their estimate of the amount of Sterling in circulation	£54.2 billion
Percentage of TIs that are city-based	27.5% ³
Percentage of TIs engaged in projects around food and growing	40% ⁴
Number of initiatives in New Zealand registered with Transition Network	11
Number of initiatives in New Zealand registered on national Transition site	70
Number of Transition initiatives set up by local councils.	0 ⁴
Percentage of TIs reporting “attracting wider interest” as their biggest obstacle	76%
Percentage of TIs who have begun ‘building a bridge to local government’	83% ⁴
Numbers of people estimated to read each edition of Transition Free Press	30-40,000
Number of people attending a Transition Training in Nagymágocs, a central-south Hungarian village.	8 (should have been more but “most of the participants chose to go to a pig slaughter instead”.