ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the politics of climate change, multiple resource crisis and, increasingly, capitalist crisis developed in the UK and elsewhere by the Transition Initiatives ‘movement’, which seeks to develop a positive, prefigurative grassroots politics that ‘looks more like a party than a protest march’ (Hopkins 2008). The chapter argues that Transition Initiatives embody a progressive politics of climate change and resource crises that rejects the dualism of adaptation and mitigation; is connected to the geographies of responsibility for past and contemporary carbon emissions, and is collective, not individual. The chapter then reviews experiences of the practices of transition in Liverpool and Stroud, UK. Liverpool is a well-known post-industrial port city in northwestern England, while less well-known Stroud is a small post-industrial town in Gloucestershire, southwest England, with a long history of ecological activism and innovation. The chapter concludes by arguing that while the politics of transition is now an international phenomenon, questions remain surrounding the extent to which a local politics of transition can provide the motive power for a fundamental reorganisation of carbon-intensive economies. The strength of the transitioning approach lies more in the generation of visions, ideas and techniques for living in a utopian post-oil community than in its ability to make the necessary changes alone.
