Disconnected Allies: How Our Theory of Transition Found Us
The idea of “disconnected allies” reframes the challenges facing the Wye‑Usk, the Fens and Fife, revealing that the real barrier to change is disconnection rather than a lack of solutions. Jyoti Banerjee explores how North Star Transition’s evolving Theory of Transition demonstrates the power of reconnecting people and expertise across landscapes.
We didn't set out to write a theory of transition. We set out to transform a landscape. Along the way we learned how to drive a systemic transformation.
Some of the best teachers about transformation are the much-loved Wye and Usk. But they are rivers in trouble: polluted by decades of runoff, flanked by farms squeezed between low incomes and rising costs, feeding communities caught in a food-energy-poverty nexus that no single policy seems able to touch. Early on, we were assured the job of regenerating these rivers was technical. Better slurry management. Smarter land use. A catchment plan with the right numbers in it. The public authorities pinned their hopes on nutrient-neutrality credits – and they seemed determined to stick to tried-and-tested engineering approaches to resolve problems caused, in large part, by poor engineering.
After decades of pollution, we felt a new approach was needed.
Working with people in the regions of the Wye and Usk, we have seen again and again, that the problem facing participants was not a shortage of solutions but of alliances. The landscape was full of people who should have been working together and weren't. Among them, a water company with a statutory duty and a five-year investment cycle; a farmer with decades of local knowledge and no seat at the table where decisions about her land got made; a public health commissioner watching chronic illness rise without the budget line to ask why; an investor who could see the commercial case for nature-based infrastructure but had nowhere legitimate to put the money.
In their own domains, each of them was doing a reasonable job. Indeed, we met many who were doing more than just a reasonable job. They were committed, passionate, keen to see a transformation; and they were all too often bitterly disappointed that their efforts were failing to achieve the changes they wanted to bring about. What we found surprising was that many of them did not know each other at all. And when they did know each other, they often felt suspicious of each other’s motives and approaches. Neither were they working with each other, nor did they have ideas about how to forge stronger alliances to amplify their shared interests.
When we started calling these disparate people and groups “disconnected allies”, the phrase really took hold. It did more work for us than any strategy document. It reframed the problem. It helped people to grasp that we weren't short of people who cared about the degraded landscapes they were in. We were short of the relationships, the shared language, and the institutional architecture that would let people who already had aligned interests act in unity to advance their ideas and proposals for change. First in the Wye-Usk, then in the Fens, and later, in Fife, wherever North Star Transition’s work expanded in reach, we found the same phenomenon.
The systemic failure wasn't ecological or economic in the first instance. It was relational.
Seeing patterns
Seeing that pattern in one landscape, helped us see it everywhere we looked. It became our opening observation whenever we were invited to work in a new landscape: “how are the relationships in this place? How much goodwill can be built so that all these caring individuals and organisations can find their way to confluence?”
When we set up the Fens Transition Lab, we found a different political geography from the Wye-Usk, but largely the same structural challenges: peat soils oxidising, infrastructure ageing faster than it could be renewed, rural communities living in the shadow of the Cambridge economy without sharing its prosperity, and a sense of dislocation between local and regional governments and the communities they serve. Even if the specifics were different in the Wye-Usk landscape, the structural disconnects remained the same. No single actor held responsibility for the problem of a dysfunctional and ailing landscape as a whole, because responsibility was split across organisations, sectors and policy areas that had no reason to talk to one another. Responses were designed and delivered around whichever single issue had a budget line attached, leaving root causes untouched. And even where people could see the value of collaborating, there was little incentive or tangible support to do it: the benefits were shared, indirect, or years away, while the costs of coordination were immediate and fell on whoever tried first to take the initiative.
These realities gave us our fundamental insight: this is where most attempts at systemic change quietly give up. It may be easy to fund a project, but a relationship has to be built from something other than money. Likewise, it's easier (though still difficult) to measure a wetland restored than to measure trust rebuilt between a regulator and a farmer. In tracking these stories and their effects, we began to figure out why the money always flows to the visible, siloed fix, while the underlying pattern of disconnection reproduces itself, landscape after landscape, cycle after cycle, disappointment after disappointment.
Our theory of transition emerged from our refusal to accept that a trade-off between funding a project and making a durable change. We came to understand, from watching it happen rather than from any prior conviction, that action drives belief more reliably than belief drives action. In this, we kept our focus on building our own strong relationships. We received plenty of encouragement from our first ever partner, UCL’s Climate Action Unit, which is still deeply invested in the work. Kris de Meyer, a behavioural scientist who leads the Climate Action Unit, continually challenges us to focus on actions, no matter how small. He’s always reminding us that, while plenty of people have beliefs, a majority don’t act on them. Start with actions instead, he has taught us, and the consequences are that, over time and with continued support, people are prepared to shift their beliefs.
Shared agency
Stakeholders don't need to agree on a shared vision before they can work together; they need to make a start, working together in small and low-risk ways, before a shared vision becomes something they can believe in. Relationships come first. Relationship-building is not a soft precursor to the “real work” of landscape regeneration, but the actual platform the real work runs on. Actions follow these relationships closely, sequenced so that early work on governance and trust unlocks the investment and delivery that follow. Mindsets shift last, once people have acted and learned together long enough to see that a different kind of change is possible.
Over time, we came to see our role in a Transition Lab more like gravity. We don't design solutions for communities or the landscapes they’re defending. We create the conditions under which disconnected allies find each other, form relationships, and start moving in a shared direction. That is so much harder to put into a grant application than “we will restore X hectares of wetland.” But it is, in our view, the actual transformational lever. Network leadership, that lovely phrase Jane Wei-Skillern has been studying, means building trust-based relationships instead of control systems, and elevating other people's leadership instead of substituting for it. And this, we have come to realise, is exactly what we do.
We didn’t start out imagining North Star Transition’s own role as that of a delivery organisation, an organisation that undertook the task of bringing people together to tackle the scary challenge of changing the landscape and systems they found themselves in. However, that’s what we found was missing. But our question is how can we drive forward an agenda towards landscape transformation, when no one has asked us to do the work and particularly when funding this work is no one’s mandate?
Olivier, my co-founder, and I are not ecologists. Or farmers. Or environmental activists. But we do bring decades of business and entrepreneurship experience to our conception of Transition Labs. Unsurprisingly, right at the start of North Star Transition, we put plenty of focus into finance.
Our focus on finance, while crystal clear to us, was never going to be enough to convene the right people and help them see the system clearly. Somebody still has to pay for what they decide to do, and the tailored transaction models and governance structures for systemic, cross-sector finance mostly don't exist yet. Public and private funders each operate within mandates built for single-issue problems. This means that, alongside the relational work that is our first emphasis, we have worked on unblocking the financial plumbing too: working with public and private capital to construct the mechanisms and governance that let money move at the scale and pace the system actually needs, rather than the scale any one funder's remit and financial cycles allows.
None of our work started as theory. We really only started theorising when we kept noticing patterns in rooms full of people who had every reason to work together and no mechanism for doing so. The theory of transition that’s emerged from our experiments in connecting allies is our attempt to write down what in fact worked when we stopped trying to solve the problem for people, and instead started trying to reconnect the people who could solve it themselves. It remains a work in progress, because the landscapes we work in keep teaching us things which allows our theory to develop.
In the end, this is the point of our work and our approach: we are living out our own insights, an important one of which is that a theory of transition that couldn't change would be exactly the kind of siloed fix we need to move beyond. Facilitating the alliances and expertise to regenerate landscapes is far from a theoretical activity. It’s a way of supporting people to connect, and to collaborate, and to move collectively towards positive change.
Read our Theory of Transition here.
