Working with Local Councils – a Transition Ingredient.
As some of you may be aware of, over the last few months I have been working in my academic capacity with Fife Council and Fife Community groups as well as Academic Partners to engage in a dialogue on carbon reduction and climate change. Forging connection between local authorities and local community groups is – as you may remember – an ingredient of the Transition Towns Model. So far we have held three seminars: one on Transport, one on Energy and one on Food. The atmosphere at these events has been vibrant and the feedback from participants is that this is proving to be an effective way to break down some of the barriers and pre-conceptions that might get in the way of the council and community interface.
Councillors and Community representative at an Open Space event in Letham Village Hall during the Nourishing Communities seminar.
To give some highlights:
At the Energy seminar in Levenmouth we had about 50 people. Tom Morton gave an excellent talk about the work going on in North Howe after which we heard about the Newburgh wind farm proposals from Neil Anderson and we heard from Fife council how they are strategically an pragmatically addressing energy efficiency. After lunch we learned about the achievements of the Levenmouth Community Initiative – CLEAR.
We than ran a very lively Open Space session tackling 6/7 different topics, including e.g. social equity in Fife. Neil Stoddart reported back on this session out of which emerged two main ideas:
-Supporting the less affluent communities in Fife by setting up a working group to connect different community groups together in order to exchange experience and provide e.g. help to access funding. This was immediately implemented by agreeing a date for a workshop meeting between NHTT and CLEAR – this meeting has since happened and follow up meetings are planned.
-Another idea that emerged – more long term – was that of utilising the potential profits of Community Energy Initiatives (such as the Newburgh one) to set up a rolling fund for investing into further community energy projects and so providing a community peer to peer support system.
The Transport Seminar brought out other interesting issues. Crispin Hayes presented his approach to community footpath development and the opportunities for community involvement and other social benefits. Stuart Knowles (Fife Council Transportation) provided us with many insights, perhaps the most unexpected being that in a time of economic downturn (with serious public spending cuts no doubt soon the follow the election) sustainable transport might well be the answer, as it is cost effective. In other words it is cheaper to provide for cycling, walking and public transport than to maintain a road system for private cars.
The most recent seminar was on food held at Letham Village Hall. Food is a complex area when it comes to working out green house gas emissions – do I buy Local, Organic, Fair Trade, all or none of the above? Taking the global picture a shift away from high meat and diary products is important. It was enlightening to learn from the Fife Council procurement officer the many restraints the council is under with regards to their food procurement process.
Fife diet was well represented with some excellent speakers Pete Ritchie, Mike Small and Elly Kinross who gave us many ideas on building resilient community food systems, and how Fife might address this now and in the future.
The final seminar in this series will be held on 19th of May at Elmwood College in Cupar and the theme is Resilient Communities Revitalising Regions. The event is free if you want to book please contact justin.kenrick@st-andrews.ac.uk
Hamid van Koten
For more information see:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/engage/projects/communitycarbonemissions/
