History
The Transition Research Network emerged out of an interest group on researching transition that met for the first time at the 2010 Transition Network conference in Newton Abbot, Devon, then at the 2011 conference in Liverpool. The meeting at the 2011 conference agreed to seek funding to develop a network of academics and transition activists interested in collaborating on research. It also encouraged steps towards addressing specific issues concerning the relationship between Transition and academic research that remained unresolved ever since researchers first started to contact Transition Network in 2007.
In September 2011, as a direct outcome of steps taken following the Liverpool conference, Transition Network, in partnership with academics at Durham University’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, along with Bradford, Glamorgan and Manchester Universities, were awarded a £78,000 grant in the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme for a project that explored the relationship between Transition and Academia in a variety of ways. This included:
Alongside this, the North East and Manchester Beacons for Public Engagement agreed to fund two meetings of the new Transition Research Network (TRN). The first of these, at the Quaker Meeting House in Manchester in November 2011, was organised and hosted by Michelle Bastian of Manchester University and Transition Liverpool, Ben Brangwyn and Naresh Giangrande of Transition Network and Tom Henfrey, former Beacon North East theme leader in energy and environment at Durham University and Transition Durham. You can find out more about the meeting here.
For the Plymouth meeting, Larch Maxey of Plymouth University and Transition Town Totnes joined the organising team. The meeting was held at the Transition Hub, which Transition Plymouth kindly made available for the day, on February 29th 2012. Find out more about what we did here. Theme-specific events on Energy and Food took place during late 2012 and early 2013, followed by Theory of Change Workshops in Lewes and London and a Learning Day in Bristol in summer 2013, reporting on and discussing findings from the Connected Communities project.
Following on from the Monitoring and Evaluation component of the Connected Communities study, a team of researchers from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute helped develop the project Monitoring and Evaluation for Sustainable Communities, which together with Transition Network and the Low Carbon Communities Network supported Transition initiatives and other communty groups to meet their own evaluation needs and developed a guide to monitoring and evaluation for Transition initiatives now hosted by Transition Network.
During 2012 TRN collaborated in the development of TREE (Transition Research, Evaluation and Engagement), an application for FP7 funding from the European Union. While unsuccessful, TREE created relationships and momentum that fed into the establishment of ECOLISE, the European Network of Community-Led Sustainability Initiatives. In part building on TRN's pioneering work in this respect, ECOLISE adopted Knowledge and Learning as one of its three central pillars of work (alongside Communication and Policy), in the process absorbing most of the research networking and project development functions of TRN. A session at the Resilience 2014 Conference in Montpellier, France in 2014, jointly hosted by TRN and ECOLISE and combining short presentations with Open Space discussion, eventually led to the publication of the book Resilience, Community Action and Societal Transformation, with TRN among the production partners, in May 2017.
In September 2011, as a direct outcome of steps taken following the Liverpool conference, Transition Network, in partnership with academics at Durham University’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, along with Bradford, Glamorgan and Manchester Universities, were awarded a £78,000 grant in the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme for a project that explored the relationship between Transition and Academia in a variety of ways. This included:
- A study on experiences of researching transition
- Development of improved protocols for collaboration between researchers and transition initiatives
- Pilot studies on the documentation of transition initiatives’ activities
- Scoping of methods for evaluation of the impact of Transition Initiatives on their communities.
Alongside this, the North East and Manchester Beacons for Public Engagement agreed to fund two meetings of the new Transition Research Network (TRN). The first of these, at the Quaker Meeting House in Manchester in November 2011, was organised and hosted by Michelle Bastian of Manchester University and Transition Liverpool, Ben Brangwyn and Naresh Giangrande of Transition Network and Tom Henfrey, former Beacon North East theme leader in energy and environment at Durham University and Transition Durham. You can find out more about the meeting here.
For the Plymouth meeting, Larch Maxey of Plymouth University and Transition Town Totnes joined the organising team. The meeting was held at the Transition Hub, which Transition Plymouth kindly made available for the day, on February 29th 2012. Find out more about what we did here. Theme-specific events on Energy and Food took place during late 2012 and early 2013, followed by Theory of Change Workshops in Lewes and London and a Learning Day in Bristol in summer 2013, reporting on and discussing findings from the Connected Communities project.
Following on from the Monitoring and Evaluation component of the Connected Communities study, a team of researchers from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute helped develop the project Monitoring and Evaluation for Sustainable Communities, which together with Transition Network and the Low Carbon Communities Network supported Transition initiatives and other communty groups to meet their own evaluation needs and developed a guide to monitoring and evaluation for Transition initiatives now hosted by Transition Network.
During 2012 TRN collaborated in the development of TREE (Transition Research, Evaluation and Engagement), an application for FP7 funding from the European Union. While unsuccessful, TREE created relationships and momentum that fed into the establishment of ECOLISE, the European Network of Community-Led Sustainability Initiatives. In part building on TRN's pioneering work in this respect, ECOLISE adopted Knowledge and Learning as one of its three central pillars of work (alongside Communication and Policy), in the process absorbing most of the research networking and project development functions of TRN. A session at the Resilience 2014 Conference in Montpellier, France in 2014, jointly hosted by TRN and ECOLISE and combining short presentations with Open Space discussion, eventually led to the publication of the book Resilience, Community Action and Societal Transformation, with TRN among the production partners, in May 2017.
