Transition Nottingham contacted Rob Hopkins (Co-founder of Transition Network) to ask him for help with their EDAP. We found Rob’s response very interesting and knowng that some of our readers are involved with Transition we thought you would like to see this too:
What is an EDAP and why would anyone do one? ‘Create an Energy Descent Action Plan’ is the 12th of Transition’s 12 Steps, intended as the culmination of the preceding eleven. The idea is that it is one of the key things that distinguishes Transition from other approaches, that rather than being a disparate assembly of projects, Transition pulls together a range of initiatives and puts them in the wider strategic context of intentionally planning for the relocalisation of the settlement as a whole. An EDAP is, in essence, a Plan B for the community, a mapping out of how the community might get from here to there. The reality is though, that although the first thorough EDAP (for Totnes) has just been published, still none of us know, in practical terms, what planning for the intentional powering down and relocalisation of a city will look like in practice.
How might a Transition group know when it is ready to undertake such a project? It is hard to come up with hard and fast quantifiable criteria such as “when over 10% of people in the community have attended a Transition event” (the Totnes survey showed about 25%), “when over 50%, when surveyed state that the work your Transition initiative is doing is relevant to their lives” (in Totnes it was 61%), or “when over 50% have heard of your initiative” (in Totnes it was 75%). These criteria would be different for every settlement, although clearly some significant degree of community buy-in and support will be vital. Undertaking an EDAP does, however, require certain foundations to be in place, including;
- a dedicated group of people for whom creating an EDAP is what fires their passion, is the thing they most want to bring about for the Transition initiative
- good links with as many other organisations in the community as possible (i.e. the local council, schools, other environmental groups, community groups and so on), so the plan can represent their views as much as possible, and get them engaged in its creation
- some dedicated resource for the project, it is an impossible project to pull of with no budget whatsoever (you’ll need to run events, hire rooms and halls, produce materials and so on…)
- strong Transition working groups who can drive forward, collaboratively, their parts of the Plan
- a good level of awareness raising to have been done, so that an EDAP process isn’t constantly having to start from square one every time
- space in the Transition initiative’s programme of events for EDAP to become a theme that runs through it
- good web facilities to enable discussion of ideas, collaborative editing of drafts, promotion of events.
Creating the Totnes EDAP, an Energy Descent Plan covering a settlement of 8,500 people and its surrounding catchment of around 23,000 people was a big undertaking. It required around 2o months of time, a full time paid co-ordinator, additional funding for design and printing, and the voluntary efforts of many people. I think that what we have produced is an unprecedented piece of work, something with much that can be replicated in other settlements of a similar size (we learnt a lot doing that will be of use to other communities). A good example of a mini-EDAP, or what was termed a ‘pre-DAP’, can be seen in Transition Forest Row’s ‘Forest Row in Transition’ document, done in a short period of time as a vision document. I am less confident, however, that the EDAP model, as currently imagined, transfers across intact as an approach, to, say, Bristol or Leeds, and here are some thoughts as to why.
1. Can Community-led plans ever be comprehensive?
Can communities be expected to cover all the bases that such a plan would require? One of the things I have done in the PhD I am doing (nearing completion) is to take the Resilience Indicators developed in the Totnes EDAP and drop them into a table generated by Liz Cox at New Economics Foundation of indicators for a sustainable economy. What emerges is that Resilience Indicators generated by a community (well, Totnes at least) tend to fall within the columns that relate to economics, local resilient infrastructure and so on, and not in governance, social enterprise and interdependence (seeing the wider picture) – these things fall, at least in the case of Totnes, outside of a community’s interests/expertise, yet they are essential to an effective and comprehensive response.
They are areas that are usually the domain of Council planners, enterprise agencies, businesses and so on. The Totnes EDAP is the community’s plan, reflective of the passions and interests of those that get involved in the process, but how it now intertwines with Council policy remains to be seen, that will be the focus of TTT’s work over the next few months. Might it be that for cities, effective and comprehensive plans of this nature will require the Transition initiative to work together with its local Council, and with other organisations with some of the other expertise lacking within the Transition group?
2. Do cities and towns develop differently?
A few months ago I sat at Birmingham New Street Station with Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association, discussing this whole question of what EDAP might look in the urban context. A town like Totnes, every few years, goes through a planning process, where it looks forward over the next 10 years, and plans how it might develop…
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*Courtesy of Transition Culture.
