ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

MAPPING COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES FOR CO-DESIGNING REGIONAL SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral SS 10 | Shaping Regional Futures Toward Sustainable Transitions: Community Involvment In Visioning and Implementation

Speaker

Ms Anca Ioana Forgaci (Delft University of Technology)

Description

For sustainability transition policies and plans to succeed, they must address territorial specificities and mobilize commitment from communities most vulnerable to transitional challenges. Otherwise, they risk being perceived as creating "winners" and "losers," eroding trust in governance, increasing resistance to change, and exacerbating polarization and social unrest (COM, 2022). Active and direct involvement of communities is therefore an essential component of EU, national, regional, and local place-based policymaking for just sustainability transitions. However, involving communities in this policymaking is challenging because it is often a technocratic, top-down endeavor with little apparent relevance or meaning for communities.

Against this background, this paper discusses an instrumental approach to revealing the dreams and expectations of the least-engaged communities (LECs) in place-based policymaking in four European regions transitioning from coal and iron mining. The analysis was carried out as part of experimentation with design-led territorial and digital tools in the Horizon Europe project Democratising jUst Sustainability Transitions (DUST) in Norrbotten (SE), Stara Zagora (BG), Katowice (PL), and Lusatia (DE). Experiments titled Regional Futures Literacy Labs (RFLLs) engaged local communities in deliberations on transition policies during four co-design workshops.

The concept of Territorial Capital (TC) provided a framework to trace deliberations, identify regional social-spatial dynamics, inform regional design explorations, and compare community and policy perspectives. The communities’ dreams and expectations were captured through audio recordings, transcribed, and qualitatively analyzed using Atlas.ti software. The coding system was developed using a combined deductive and inductive approach, starting with broad predefined TC categories and gaining depth with specific TC aspects identified inductively in the qualitative data collected from LECs.

This paper presents key findings on the communities’ dreams and expectations vis-à-vis sustainability transition policymaking and explores how these narratives can inform regional designs and community-policy comparisons. The preliminary conclusions of the paper are twofold. First, we draw on the empirical results to discuss how the transition narratives of LECs evolved over the course of the labs and under the influence of various factors. Second, we propose how methods can be refined to enhance community future literacy and support community reflection on regional sustainability transitions. Final conclusions will draw on how the proposed design-led methodology can facilitate policy and community alignment, indicating their potential to better represent LECs' voices in shaping policies across diverse regional contexts, fostering inclusive decision-making processes.

References

COM (2022) ‘Cohesion in Europe towards 2050’ Eighth report on economic, social and territorial cohesion, Brussels: European Commission