THE TRANSITION INITIATIVE

6 Principles of Transition

Positive Visioning

• Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present?day dependence on fossil fuels. Our primary focus is not campaigning against things, but rather on positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities. The generation of new stories and myths are central to this visioning work.

Help People Access Good Information and Trust Them to Make Good Decisions

• Transition initiatives dedicate themselves, through all aspects of their work, to raising awareness of peak oil and climate change and related issues such as critiquing economic growth. In doing so they recognise the responsibility to present this information in ways which are playful, articulate, accessible and engaging, and which enable people to feel enthused and empowered rather than powerless.

• Transition initiatives focus on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information available is deeply contradictory.

• The messages are non?directive, respecting each person's ability to make a response that is appropriate to their situation.

Inclusion and Openness

• Successful Transition Initiatives need an unprecedented coming together of the broad diversity of society. They dedicate themselves to ensuring that their decision making processes and their working groups embody principles of openness and inclusion.

• This principle also refers to the principle of each initiative reaching the community in its entirety, and endeavouring, from an early stage, to engage their local business community, the diversity of community groups and local authorities.

• It makes explicit the principle that there is, in the challenge of energy descent, no room for ‘them and us' thinking.

 

? Transition Initiatives dedicate themselves to sharing their successes, failures, insights and connections at the various scales across the Transition network, so as to more widely build up a collective body of experience.

Build Resilience

• This stresses the fundamental importance of building resilience, that is, the capacity of our businesses, communities and settlements to deal as well as possible with shock. Transition initiatives commit to building resilience across a wide range of areas (food, economics, energy etc) and also on a range of scales (from the local to the national) as seems appropriate ? and to setting them within an overall context of the need to do all we can to ensure general environmental resilience.

Inner and Outer Transition

• The challenges we face are not just caused by a mistake in our technologies but as a direct result of our world view and belief system. The impact of the information about the state of our planet can generate fear and grief ? which may underlie the state of denial that many people are caught in. Psychological models can help us understand what is really happening and avoid unconscious processes sabotaging change. E.g. addictions models, models for behavioural change. This principle also honours the fact that Transition thrives because it enables and supports people to do what they are passionate about, what they feel called to do.

Subsidiarity: self?organisation and decision making at the appropriate level

• This final principle enshrines the idea that the intention of the Transition model is not to centralise or control decision making, but rather to work with everyone so that it is practiced at the most appropriate, practical and empowering level, and in such a way that it models the ability of natural systems to self organise.
  

 

"Power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top?down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by us all".

Trippi, J. (2004) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Harper Collins.

  "As innovation becomes more central to the way we make our livings and how we tackle pressing challenges we face - from global warming to health pandemics - our well?being will depend more and more on what we share with others and create together".  Leadbeater,, C. (2008) We?Think: mass innovation, not mass production. Profile Books.

"Humans are capable of a unique trick, creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. ...As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our mind's eye, we are already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it begins to come true. The act of imagining somehow makes it real... And what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life".

Brian Eno