Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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unfinished milieu, and simultaneously drawing out differences that give depth and relief to the moving so described. The result is the ability to glimpse into a number of traits of the Transition phenomenon that are otherwise lost in more linearised accounts: its tentativeness, the porousness of its boundaries and its increasing diversification that together make attempts at a definition appear ultimately inadequate to re-present this ongoing motion.
What the literature I have discussed so far seems to show, therefore, is precisely that Transition – when approached on its own terms – for example by paying attention to the process by which situated instances conjure an emerging form of life, becomes something dynamic and alive. It becomes an unfolding appearance. It is from this initial impression that an invitation arises to intensify and deepen this experience of moving, as it already transpires from this brief run-through of a small section of the literature on Transition (from the late 2000s up to the time of writing). This is the invitation that I take up in the following chapters, where I try to dwell on some of the articulations of Transition that obtain an identity by virtue of belonging to ‘it’, and from which ‘it’ is simultaneously shaped. Before moving on, however, I am going to engage briefly with other studies that are devoted explicitly to Transition. My intention here is to show how some of the conventions of academic practice adopted in those works appear to stand in the way of offering an account of the moving of Transition that can capture the dynamism that has just been outlined. This critical gaze over previous scholarly work will also offer an opportunity for teasing out further distinctions and degrees of nuance to better underscore the identifying qualities of the book you are holding in your hands.
How this book differs from previous work
Transition has been extensively written about in academic circles. Beyond Hopkins’s own PhD, scholars such as Gill Seyfang, Noel Longhurst, Peter North, Giuseppe Feola and others have all authored important contributions. In this chapter, I find it convenient to qualify the type of talk about Transition that seems to transpire from their work as a ‘policy-oriented’ approach. My feeling, in other words, is that the audience those works seem to presuppose is one of other academics and/or professionals interested in Transition as a policy. Theirs appears to be an (still commendable) effort to translate Transition into a form of address that may be understood – and hopefully acted upon – by policy-makers. And the makers of policies, whether they are other academics, civil servants or other professionals involved in think tanks or consulting bodies, seem to look for a particular structure of presentation. To describe the backbone of this, it is perhaps convenient to attempt a correspondence with what Shotter calls ‘the quantitative way of seeing the world’,53 where ‘quantity’ can be understood as anything that ‘has parts external to one another’,54 so that – through that category – ‘the world becomes visible in a particular way [...] constituted [precisely] in the form of “parts external to one another”’.55
In this setting, Transition can be understood as a closed set of instructions to be rolled out onto the world, and subsequently evaluated – alongside other competing ‘policies’ – for its ability to elicit change from one state to another. The type of questions this asks of Transition, which I hope to make apparent in the coming paragraphs, are completely different to what I am asking of it here. Whereas the problem for ‘policy-oriented’ discourse is how Transition can allow to get from state A to state B, and therefore presupposes a normative orientation, the inquiry I carry out is one that does not take that orientation for granted. If anything, I try to get lost precisely in the maze of possibilities that simultaneously co-exist as available ‘next steps’ from within the unfolding time-shape of Transition. For me, Transition discloses a number of interesting problems and tensions related precisely to the process of finding an orientation amidst such a maze, so that the identity of Transition is fluid and its future manifold.56 Taking that orientation for granted changes the question to one of instrumentality, which removes the sort of controversies that interest me and, for this particular purpose, is a less fruitful approach.57
So it is the case, for instance, that Seyfang is concerned with formulating Transition primarily as a strategy to achieve a number of desirables, and particularly the shift to sustainable ‘sociotechnical systems of provision’.58 This shift can be articulated through objectives like improving the environmental performance of food supply chains, or the enlargement of sustainable consumption choices59; goals to the achievement of which Transition can contribute as an instance of ‘grassroots innovation’.60 In the light of this, ‘[t]he role of local Transition initiatives is to engage communities in a process of envisioning positive scenarios of a post-oil future, and then begin the work of building the infrastructure, habits and institutions to move towards that future’.61 In this sense, the overarching question appears to be how can Transition be ‘translated’ as a set of instrumental strategies through which a range of desirables are to be achieved.62
A similar understanding appears to surface in the work of North and Longhurst. In one paper, for instance, they examine Transition (again, understood as a set of strategies for the implementation of normatively-fixed goals) under the lens of replicability.63 What this means is that they are interested in clarifying what conditions can enable the expansion of Transition in urban, as opposed to rural, settings. Hence they undertake an inquiry focused on the comparative dimension: they try to understand the moving of Transition extensively, by abstracting a set of variables or indicators that can enable prediction and control/adjustment for Transition to reach out to ‘urban’ settings (some of the factors they single out are ‘alliances with local development agencies’, ‘urban cosmopolitanism’ and ‘grassroots activism’).64 This is again an analytical reduction of Transition, precisely because it singles out a number of traits for the purpose of facilitating the achievement of pre-specified goals.
Longhurst equally shares a similar focus in his PhD dissertation.65 That work is based – like this book – on a period of fieldwork in Totnes. Its main concern, however, is framed in analytical terms. What he does, in fact, is to begin by abstracting a number of ‘variables’: namely the presence of what he calls a ‘progressive’ milieu and the development of ‘alternative’ or ‘post-capitalist’ economic institutions. The scope of his study is then framed in terms of ascertaining whether or not there is a relation between these two discrete variables; it is to ‘test’ the hypothesis that these are correlated.66
The most recent, and to an extent the most exemplary, addition to this strand of literature is a working paper by Feola and Nunes.67 By relying on Seyfang’s work,68 they also begin with a definition of Transition as a strategy of ‘grassroots innovation’ to address the socio-economic challenges posed by climate change. It is in order to examine Transition as one such strategy that they go on to undertake a study of the relative success and failure of individual Transition initiatives. For this purpose, they identify a number of variables against which to then go on to measure the achievements of different initiatives. In their paper, the quantitative way of seeing that has been discussed earlier is made most explicit as a range of simplifications have to be undertaken in order to morph Transition into a manageable dataset. The paragraph below gives a flavour of the linearisation that is imposed upon it when working in a quantitative frame of mind:
[T]he success of TIs [Transition Initiatives] is defined along the lines of social connectivity and empowerment, and external impact or contribution to environmental performance. In this paper we have correlated the success of TIs to objective measures of activity and participation (i.e. members, duration, activities undertaken – steps to transition) [...] our results do suggest that, whilst there is no formula for more, or less success, TIs can be arranged into four typical configurations or clusters of variable success and failure.69
The standard of discourse that appears to shine through this strand of ‘policy-oriented’ literature is one that is centred on analytical precision and dissection, for the purpose of evaluation, assessment and measurement of any unit of analysis against a number of normatively established goals and in competition both with itself (between different Transition initiatives) and with alternative ‘strategies’. The ensuing picture of Transition is akin to an assemblage of parts and variables ‘that retain their character irrespective of whether they are part of the assemblage or not’.70 In this sense, when subjected to analytical divide-and-rule tactics, Transition as an assemblage