Community organizing, sustainability transitions and public policies: Introduction to the special section

A relevant body of research has emerged which explores the role of community-based or grassroots initiatives in promoting environmental innovation, community building, social integration, empowerment and societal transitions. This research often refers to the ambivalent relationship between community organizing, public policies and politics, albeit rarely in a systematic manner and across various domains of community activism. The aim of this special section is to contribute further to this debate by analyzing specific policy issues which emerged from three large-scale research projects on community-based initiatives and sustainable transitions in Europe. In line with the call made by James Meadowcroft in the very first issue of this journal (2011), the ambition is to contribute to a politically-oriented research agenda on sustainability and, in our case, community-led transitions. The policy issues discussed in this collection refer, on the one hand, to very practical difficulties these initiatives face, like finding an appropriate legal status, accessing public funding and the consequences thereof, dealing with often incoherent and unsuitable regulations, or having a voice in the governance of some crucial policy areas. On the other hand, investigating how these challenges are managed in practice is useful for highlighting more general tensions between communities’ self-organization and wider political regimes, how these tensions are negotiated within more or less favorable policy landscapes and how similar initiatives react, adapt and behave differently. This research, we believe, is crucial to identify the very conditions for sustainability transitions to occur. In this introductory article we provide some introductory reflections on the topic, as well as a summary of the contributions to the special section.