Towards sustainable and resilient societies through empowered civil society and collaborative innovation
We make transition!

WMT! Manual - Practical Use of the Transition Arena to Engage Local Actors in Building Sustainable Future at Local Level

29 October 2025
The ‘Transition Arena’ is a participatory method used to engage people in a collective process of understanding, learning, visioning, and experimenting around specific societal transition challenges. Arena is a workshop process that helps to reflect critically on unsustainable structures, cultures, and practices.
Technical details

 

Societal transitions are complex, non-linear, and long-term processes of societal change. Transition management seeks – instead of optimising existing systems – to anticipate transitions, and to accelerate and guide the types of emerging changes that could contribute to transitions with desired outcomes. (Notermans, von Wirth, Loorbach 2022).

We make transition! had the aim to utilise the ‘Transition Arena’ method in a practical way to promote interaction, co-creation and transformative cooperation between local/regional authorities and civil society, business and other small local actors. We make transition! implemented local transition arena processes in 12 locations around the Baltic Sea Region. Each transition arena had a unique sustainability topic that was chosen based on the local priorities and needs.

Manual on the practical use of Transition Arena

The manual aims to reveal the high value of interactive processes that help break the silos and involve all levels of society. It provides practical advice to local authorities and any other interested actors on how to utilise the transition management approach to enhance common understanding, dive into systemic challenges, reduce polarisation and go beyond business-as-usual in public governance.

Presentation on the principles of transition arena and learnings from We make transition! project

We-make-transition_Presentation.pdf

 

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