Ecovillage transition in action: communication, cooperation and collaboration beyond community

Ecovillages and community-led initiatives can be rich sources of local innovation and action on climate challenges and other global issues. However, community action alone is insufficient to enable a transition towards sustainability. Communication, cooperation and collaboration are often required to scale community action within, across and beyond community. The aims of this paper were to explore motivations, barriers and opportunities for collaboration and to identify frameworks for success. The research emerged from a partnership across Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), GEN Germany, ECOLISE and the Universities of St Andrews (Scotland) and Vechta (Germany) to support scaling up regenerative action from local to regional levels. We employed semi-structured interviews with twelve key informants active in collaborative projects. We questioned motivations for projects, elicited project journeys and explored whether and how community action had been scaled. We used both deductive and inductive coding to analyze results, and located these experiences within published reports of collaborative community projects and theories of social innovation and social practice. We found that projects were often seeded by individuals or small groups of people. Excellent communication was required to express the potential idea as well as promote practical action. Cooperation occurred between individuals and also within and across groups, within communities and with local authorities and other actors. Collaboration beyond communities was often motivated by a strong vision together with a smart idea based on local needs. Collaboration was pursued only when a particular intention required further input, such as regulatory support or physical infrastructure. Individuals developed relationships and built trust to enable projects to flourish and thrive. It was concluded that social and sustainable innovation thus benefits not only from excellent conceptualisation but also from people acting in /out their beliefs, and societal transitions should facilitate aspiration as well as action