Caring – Valuing – Transitioning

The Lead Project focusses on organisations whose members develop social missions as visions for the future. By putting these into practice, these organisations attempt to shape socio-economic and socio-ecological transition processes, often at the local level. Their missions are interesting to us in two respects: they function as small windows into the future as they formulate target corridors for social action. At the same time, they are strongly associated with values, often oriented towards major social challenges or UN sustainability goals. Bioenergy villages, MehrWertOrte (places of added value), housing cooperatives, innovative conversion models for vacant farms, and forms of community-supported agriculture impressively demonstrate what can be achieved locally. But how do these ideas spread? How do they contribute to a change in social values and thereby influence urgently needed transformation processes at national and global levels?

This is where the project intervenes, addressing three key research questions: (1) How and under what spatial conditions are values and visions of the future negotiated within mission-oriented organisations, and how does this affect their development? (2) In what contexts do mission-oriented organisations operate, and how do they interact with their environment? (3) What can be learned from un/successful organisations about shaping change?

The project team does not address these questions alone. Instead, it works closely with local initiatives and organisations. In so-called futuring workshops, visions of the future are developed together with local activists and their implementation is considered. The implies the systematic exploration of future scenarios in interactive formats in the organisations' respective fields of activity (e.g. bioenergy or equitable distribution of home ownership). Research participants are also involved in analysising interim results to design future-oriented development spaces based on these findings. A further objective is to launch a practice-oriented, transdisciplinary follow-up project in partnership with the research participants.