Transforming places together: transformative community strategies responding to climate change and sustainability challenges

The simple evidence of global temperature rises, changing rainfall patterns and more frequent or extreme weather events are indisputable and will severely impact communities and society as a whole. Conventional strategies and incremental adaptation are not sufficient to address climate risks and sustainability challenges, therefore scholarly attention has shifted to the concept of transformation. A major driver of deliberate transformative responses are bottom-up processes of communities and citizen collectives, able to take the lead. An increasing and wide variety of grassroots community initiatives is emerging, responding to climate risks and sustainability challenges. These bottom-up processes require agents’ capacities to implement place-based transformative solutions aligned with climate goals in different contexts. Based on a literature review and an analysis of online cases the research provides insights into strategies of community initiatives and how their practices illustrate different dimensions of transformative adaptation. Key conditions for transformative adaptation by communities turn out to be capacity-building, leadership, different forms of scaling, and an inclusive, enabling governance. Community initiatives provide an entry point for new novelties and strategies in support of radical transformative ideas. While these initiatives are place-based, there is the need to diffuse and embed these novelties in wider scales to purposely increase their transformative societal impact.