Transition Town

Origin

Transition began in Totnes, Devon, England, in 2006. Rob Hopkins, a permaculture teacher at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, had developed the [[energy-descent|Energy Descent Action Plan]] with his students in 2005 — a community-level plan for managing the transition away from fossil fuels. When he moved to Totnes, he and Naresh Giangrande adapted the framework to a working town.

Totnes became the first Transition Town. Within a few years, the model spread internationally. The Transition Network (originally Transition Town Network, now Transition Network) was founded as the international hub.

The Transition framework

The Transition model is a replicable process for community resilience-building:

1. Set up a steering group — initial organizers; eventually self-disband as working groups take over
2. Awareness raising — film screenings, talks, community forums on peak oil, climate, local economy
3. Lay the foundations — connecting with existing community organizations and stakeholders
4. Organize a Great Unleashing — public launch event signaling the initiative is active
5. Form working groups — food, energy, economy, transport, education, healthcare, building, inner transition, etc.
6. Use Open Space and other facilitative formats for community decision-making
7. Develop visible projects — community gardens, local-currency, repair cafés, energy retrofits, reskilling courses
8. Build the strategic local-resilience plan — the [[energy-descent|Energy Descent Action Plan]] or equivalent
9. Network with other Transition initiatives locally, regionally, internationally

Common Transition projects

• Local food — community gardens, harvest sharing, gleaning networks, [[community-supported-agriculture|community-supported agriculture]], seed-libraries
• Local energy — community solar, energy audits and retrofits, [[district-heating|district heating]]
• Local economy — [[local-currency|local currency]] (Brixton Pound, Bristol Pound, Totnes Pound originally), business directories, time-banks
• Reskilling — courses in food preservation, repair, building, gardening, traditional crafts
• Repair cafés — community workshops where volunteers help fix household items
• Inner transition — personal-and-cultural work supporting the transition (Active Hope, [[joanna-macy|Joanna Macy]] frameworks)
• Transition streets — neighbor-to-neighbor energy and water efficiency
• Education — Transition university, schools, curriculum integration

Influence

The Transition movement spread rapidly through the late 2000s and early 2010s. By 2020, 1,000+ initiatives existed across 50+ countries. The model influenced:

• Municipal government planning — many cities and towns have integrated Transition concepts
• Climate emergency declarations — Transition initiatives often catalyzed local government climate-emergency processes
• Community-resilience movements broadly — many recent grassroots organizations build on the Transition framework

The movement’s pace has shifted as climate and energy concerns have moved from fringe to mainstream; the Transition framework now operates alongside many parallel resilience movements.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[permaculture]] · [[bioregion]] · [[mutual-aid]]

Sources

• The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins (Green Books, 2008)
• The Transition Companion, Rob Hopkins (Chelsea Green, 2011)
• Transition Network (transitionnetwork.org)

Rooted in life.