Transition Research Network: New Knowledge for Resilient Futures

Second one-day meeting: Wed 29^th February 2012, Plymouth Transition Hub.

For the last five years, Transition Network has supported communities taking action on some of our most urgent contemporary problems: climate change, increasing scarcity of cheap energy, and loss of resilience. In the process, it has become known as one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and important social movements. Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, has identified Transition as, “the most vital social experiment of our times.”

As the Transition movement deepens and matures, the mutual benefits of close collaboration with academic researchers are becoming increasingly clear. Academic funders are attaching increasing importance to the practical outcomes of research, and funding calls increasingly encourage non-academic stakeholders to be involved from the earliest stages of planning new projects. Within Transition, there is increasing recognition of the unique and valuable contributions academic researchers can make. Specific needs already identified include: evaluating and improving process and practice in Transition, monitoring and documentation of its impacts on community resilience, and shaping new agendas and collaborative models for post-carbon research.  Working together to address these can lead to fundable, high impact collaborative projects.

The Transition Research Network is a self-organising peer group of academics and community activists with common interests in the following aims:

·      To help advance understanding and practice in Transition;

·      To support Transition groups to address their research needs

·      To help transform the crisis in our universities into an opportunity for positive change in research culture, making research relevant, fulfilling, and fun.

Our first independent meeting held in Manchester (28/11/11) identified some of the key issues, along with approaches through which they might be addressed. This, our second meeting, will take us towards identifying solutions through:

·      World Café discussion on key research needs and how to support them

·      Visioning a distinctively Transition research strategy though the world’s first research ‘permablitz’

·      Open space discussion about whatever you choose to bring

·      Finding research partners to identify and undertake vital cross-disciplinary research and access appropriate funding for this.

By the end of the day, we hope to have identified some specific projects that groups within the network are ready to take forward, come up with a vision about what we want to achieve as a network, and to have a better idea about how best to organise to achieve our goals. We’d love you to join us and become part of it.