Monitoring and reflecting Reflecting on activities and their coherence with the transition agenda can help to draw lessons and safeguard the process’ internal coherence. Participants can inspire and learn from each other by, for example, elaborating aspects of the transition agenda, exchanging experiences, or identifying challenges and opportunities from upcoming trends. At the same time, they reflect on their own routines and viewpoints, as well as on the boundary conditions of institutions, policies, and values. Learning networks can enhance learning from experiments; people in strategic positions discuss the practices started by the transition experiments and the current barriers that they reveal.
How did they do this in Ghent? The starting point for this phase was the launch event, which was attended by more than a hundred highly motivated people (‘headhunted’ by the arena participants). They were informed about the arena results thus far and invited contribute to the emerging spin-off activities. Most activities were further elaborated in Climate Working Groups. These groups started at – or shortly after – the launch event and consisted of both arena participants and gradually newly involved actors. ◆◆ Consumers push the market: organized a ‘carrot mob’ to mobilize consumers to buy goods from one shop to reward its commitments to sustainability. This one-day campaign attracted 938 mobbers and made the targeted supermarket invest €10,000 in sustainability measures. ◆◆ Energy efficiency for businesses: established a project to stimulate and guide small/ medium enterprises to prompt them to structurally work on energy efficiency. ◆◆ Green Track: over 30 cultural organizations joined this network to monitor their CO2 emissions, to develop an energy action plan and to sensitize visitors. ◆◆ Valorization of sewage water: developed a business case on the transport of organic waste through the sewage system and the use of sewage water to produce heat, biogas, nutrients and water; will now be applied in the city’s district the Old Docs (350 dwellings). ◆◆ Urban Farming: was confronted with diverging ideas: one participant left the group and started an urban farming project involving children, the others worked on a city-wide plan for urban farming. ◆◆ Blue economy: aimed to set up an iconic project based on the blue-economy principles, but was unable to involve business partners. Two more initiatives were inspired by the transition management methodology and started up a similar arena process in a different context. ◆◆ The university’s environmental coordinator, a former arena member, initiated a transition arena with over 120 students and staff members to explore how the university could become sustainable. The resulting transition agenda was formally adopted by the board of the university; spin-off activities are now starting up and sustainability platform is established; ◆◆ The municipal mobility and environmental departments jointly organized an arena process to explore the future of mobility in Ghent, involving 25 participants and several city departments (mobility, environment, spatial planning). This resulted in the enthusiastically received transition agenda ‘The bike of Troy’, regular follow-up meetings in the form of mobility cafes, and 3 iconic projects to create support for the envisioned developments.
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