Opening up the transition arena: An analysis of (dis)empowerment of civil society actors in transition management in cities

Abstract

This article shows opportunities and intricacies of transition management as a facilitated empowerment process that seeks to empower ‘frontrunners’ to (re-)define and take up roles in contributing to sustainability transitions. In the context of ‘retreating’ welfare states there is an increasing focus on ‘empowering’ civil society actors to take over service provisions and addressing sustainability challenges. This reorganisation of governments' responsibilities and tasks vis-à-vis civil society and businesses raises questions about the (uneven) (re-)distribution of responsibilities between different (groups of) actors. We first draw on insights from empowerment literature to elucidate the conceptual understanding of (dis)empowerment in transition management, focusing on the transition arena as the most prominent tool of the approach. We emphasise that transition management also harbours the risk of disempowerment, i.e. creating/exacerbating a sense of powerlessness and thus decreasing the ability of actors to take up roles in sustainability transitions. We apply the framework to analyse (dis)empowerment in transition management processes in four North-Western European ‘welfare cities’: Aberdeen (UK), Ghent (BEL), Ludwigsburg (GER), and Montreuil (FR). These processes brought together civil society actors as frontrunners in the transition arena that was facilitated by local policy officers in transition teams. Transition management appears as a fruitful intervention to boost new social relations, (re-)definitions of roles and intrinsic motivations of actors to influence sustainability transitions, yet the implementation of the empowering process principles requires new skills and mind-sets. While experimental process methodologies like transition management seem to offer new ways forward for pro-actively engaging with the intentional and unintentional changes of actor roles in the context of restructuring welfare states, how and to what extent transition management acts as a (dis)empowerment process shows that changes of roles and responsibilities need to be mediated through co-creation processes in which diverse actors jointly reflect on and discuss their roles in contributing to societal welfare.