Transition town movement – future of sustainable community (Essay Sample)

Transition Town Movement Name Instructor Institution Date Transition Towns also commonly referred to as Transition Movement or Transition Network is an environmental and social movement established from the principles of permaculture prepared by Rob Totnes in the United Kingdom and Hopkins in Kinsale (Ireland). The Transition Towns network is an interesting and totally significant local response to the touching the bigger geopolitical/security lapses and ecological, cultural, economic developmental of the coming century (Walker, 2011). The aim of the Transition Network is to encourage, inspire, support train and connect communities to organize the transition model, forming initiatives that reestablish flexibility and reduce CO2 emissions. The target of local resilience and self-reliance emanating from community participation with sustainability issues is founded on the heart of the Transition Towns idea. Their main agenda is to equip communities for the peak oil and challenges of climate change. The Transition Towns movement is a good example of socioeconomic localization that emphasizes on resilience. Resilience can be defined as the capability of a structure, starting from an individual to the whole economy, to bring together their capacity to adopt the changes and shocks from the outside world. The main idea here is to reduce the CO2 emissions from the resilience building (Audet, 2014). According to In Norwine, (2014), climate change and Peak oil also known as 'hydrocarbon twins' are the main factors this perception is based on. The major focus is the diminishing of the cheap oil because the oil exploration is believed to have ended many years ago thus ensuring a change to the oil-dependent community to sustainable ways of living. The idea of 'Transition Towns' was designed with a goal of ensuring that the small towns change from fossil fuel dependency. This idea has helped to promote citizen action and public participation within the environment of a viable and self-sufficient community. The objective is to see creation and establishment of local forums for the citizens to meet and decide on better ways to create a low-carbon energy sources or to discuss a way forward to survival projections in a post peak-oil globe. Intensely lower energy consumption, preparation for a future with economic disruption, and climate unpredictability, the ideas of Transition Town movement inspires re-localization of choices and intends to bring the shared brain of the communities' to form the networks of common provision. The Transition Towns network is the center of interest to the common climatic and resource disasters of the future years. This idea puts a lot of emphasis on planned delocalization that has very many actions included: carbon reduction, local resilience, re-skilling, decentralized energy infrastructure, food, energy descent plans, localized, local currencies and local medicinal capacity. The Transition Town movement is known to be a social innovation that is based on the climate as its major problem (Leonard, & Barry, 2009). The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), after conducting research has made the economic and social aspects of climate change its major priority for research funding. The conservation of social justice, prospects for the satisfaction of livelihoods in the economies and the critical role played by the values and the innovative classes as the new motivators of economic growth will be the community issues due to the ever increasing global fuel prices and the dwindling of the economy finally caused by the latter. The Transition Town movement is a societal innovation that can be observed as an essential response to the need for a changed way of life in post-peak climate change and post peak-oil (Smith, 2011). It is dedicated to reducing the carbon emissions to regulate climate change and to control a peak-oil problem that suggests that it has a belief that is an alternate way of shaping the economy. The Transition Town movement has expanded from Totnes to more than 134 other regions around the world on a different according to an article known as "The two limits debates: ''Limits to Growth'' and climate change", the actual answer for the issue of climate change should encompass the orientation of community values away from utilization and must stress more on sustainable creation and resource use. The Transition Towns movement that founded on the community level action and responsiveness; community and governmental levels, communication in multiple sectors, local embracement to environmental changes is among the many approaches. Indeed, there are two ideas: governmentally provided technological solutions and values reorientation that are mutually constitutive. Most people don’t have faith in politics putting the democratic institutions a worst crisis. It is widely believed that democracy has not been able to attain power for the people in respective countries in most regions of the world.Town Movement and Politics According to the definition, democracy means political equality such as equal rights for everyone to participate in the political resolutions made by the regimes. However, democracy has not guaranteed political party anymore. Currently, most people around the world are not interested in voting, the theory of Transition Towns has resulted in Participatory democracy which allows people to get involved in making political decisions for their success, and thus democracy becomes realism again. Involvement lets officials and people to make decisions on how the general policy obligations can be established. The Transition Initiatives can be effective when there is a link between the government and transition community (Hopkins, 2008). For instance, when an Energy Descent Plan has been initiated by a transition network, it will be advanced only if there is a productive and positive relationship with the local establishments of the government. Challenges of Town Movement There has been a debate on the growth of sustainable cities because of the difficulty process in their planning and implementation. The sustainability responsibility necessitates involvement of civil society and leadership from government. The Transition Town idea focuses on the fact that the thought of sustainability is introduced in their regions by the communities from their resilience. The whole features of rebellious planning can be obviously experienced in the Transition Town idea. Oppositional planning or Insurgent planning is a type of plan which affects the already traditional structures of power, contravenes 'time and place' by the process of re-claiming of historic perception and sees the idea of a different situation as being possible and necessary (Barry, 2008). An important principle that separates the Transition Towns notion from other community-based sustainability initiatives like Local Agenda 21 is that the latter is instigated and determined by the community and not the government. The manner in which the Transition depiction has been happening indicates its insurgent state. The context of this concept is very certainly available to any individual or community that focuses on sustainable living which eventually leads to the formless occurrences of the Transition Towns thus leading to varied feelings to meet the local interests. The major problems that occur here is that, diverse people have varied mindsets and when every person comes up with a different answer for the same issue, it might result in tension that is a significant problem for democracy (Aiken, 2012). According to Lo (2014) the unsatisfied nature of this idea makes it anti-democratic. Additionally, due to the fact that the transition system has a list of 14 standards to be achieved for a community to be deliberated as a Transition community or transition Town challenges the very simple principles of the idea. This approach is not prescriptive rather the contentment principles for validation are, in fact, a recommendation. Instead of allowing societies to be Transition Towns for the purposes of sustainability, this idea seems to be establishing Transition networks which doesn't maintain the idea of the Transition Town movement and this a developing problem for democracy which will have significant problems with the functioning of the local governments. The concept focuses more on a survivalist principle that is not same as the green activist policy that works on the ideologies of liberalism democracy, universalism and global engagement. There are many question raised on the resilience of the Transition Town systems, whether it is accustomed to the features such as individualism, pluralism and liberalism and the effects re-localization that will bring on the gender relations problems in the democratic structure. Individualism is unlimited in a human being and it raises issues that the parties of the transition societies might be over-enthusiastic and acting contrary to the law that has a negative consequence in a democracy. There are also doubts that resilience and re-localization that are the main components of the Transition Town movement might result to tribalism and reverses the direction of the civilizing practices. Any decrease in the territory of state conciliation is believed to result in a decline in the universality and greatness of relations of the interdependency of various groups and individuals (McKinnon & Bay, 2013). Recommendat...