Transition in Practice

Adrià Garcia i Mateu

System change or socio-technical transitions towards socio-ecological justice sometimes lack attention to details on the unfolding social activity or how transitions in practice occur. This presentation would offer a synthesis of almost a decade of practice and research in practices carried in intermediary spaces of the cooperative housing niche in Catalonia. One of the main original contributions of this work is to apply empirically Meadows (1999) leverage points’ framework to analyse the co-evolution of a niche and particularly argues the niche in focus is broadening and deepening its transformative potential and entering the acceleration phase. The other main original contribution of this work is to argue that the usually reported activity in steering transitions in intermediary spaces are practices in itself, and proposes to name them enabling transition practices and to differentiate between direct and indirect ones. The notion of indirectness is argued to broaden and deepen transition studies’ attention from methodologies or convergence-based indirect practices such as the well-known visioning, learning and networking to distributed instrumental direct practices such as policy instruments, campaigns or services. Altogether with other existing categories of practices is proposed to form a Transition Practices Framework.