Phase 2 of Fens Transition Lab starts with wide engagement
As Phase 2 of Fens Transition Lab launches across the east of England, Lea Jordan-Tank asks her colleagues at North Star Transition what they are hoping to achieve.
September 4th was a big moment for North Star Transition’s project launch: Phase 2 of Fens Transition Lab. This cross-sectoral, stakeholder led project offers an exciting pathway to designing a regenerative future for the Fens. To learn more about the people involved and their ambitions for this next step in the Transition Lab process, I talked to two of my colleagues at North Star Transition, Vivek and Vicky, who are both excited about where the project is heading.
Vivek Govil, project lead for Fens Transition Lab, tells me that this launch workshop served as a chance to get an inventory of all the initiatives that are currently in play in the region. While phase one focused on the problems faced in the Fens, phase two will now develop regenerative solutions to respond to these challenges. The objective by the end of phase two is to connect stakeholder needs to financing options, charting a pathway for interventions that are transformational, investible, and locally owned.
The work of North Star’s partners has been essential in getting this process off the ground – indeed, talking to Vivek and Vicky, I am surprised by the breadth of partners engaged in Fens Transition Lab. There is Mott MacDonald and Jacobs, two companies lending engineering expertise, Fera Science Ltd, provides scientific input, and Apella Advisors advises on communications. Several of the facilitators are representatives from one of these organisations. It strikes me just how exciting and unique it is to experience such inter-organisational collaboration in practice.
The energy in the room was high. Vicky Vanderstichele, head of Operations and Project Management at North Star, says that “stakeholders were really engaged in the process. It was lovely to see them reimagining the place where they live and work.” The task faced by the 65 participants in the room that day, and for the next two years, is no small one. Through collaborative dialogue, making connections across disciplines, they will envision areas for project development, imagining scope and scalability within the landscape. Reflecting on the enthusiasm among such a varied group of stakeholders, from agriculture to local government and academia, Vivek points out that “Getting this diverse group of local stakeholders together provided a useful opportunity to connect the dots.”
A huge shout out for the success of such a well-coordinated event goes out to UCL Climate Action Unit, who have partnered with North Star Transition to design a lab process that stimulate such lively cross-sector discussion. Vivek tells me that the format of the launch event, which encouraged participants to engage in a topic for short intense periods, switching topic areas regularly and getting them to move around the room, kept everyone very engaged and active. He is certain this bodes well for the engagement in the next workshops of phase two.
Stakeholders will now join sub-groups organised under five key themes:
Profitable and resilient agriculture
Mid-level (regional) infrastructure
Land use transformation
Methods to improve water, soil, air and biodiversity
Regenerative economic networks
From there, work in the sub-groups will progress under the guidance of a facilitator, resulting in plans to foster transformational change in each sub-area.
Fens Transition Lab is part of Future Fens Integrated Adaptation (FFIA), and occurs on the back of the infrastructure plan of Anglian Water to build two reservoirs in the region. Such a huge investment in the Fens provides opportunities for other initiatives to reach greater scale and thus greater impact by piggy backing on new financial streams. Here, North Star Transition and its partners can serve as catalysts, enabling stakeholders to envision systemic transformation and realise the financing for it. Vicky gives me a refreshing insight on this point. “[North Star Transition] doesn’t consult and then take information to make our own decisions. We are about supporting stakeholders in what they want to change in the system. We are there to enable their work, scale it, align it and resource it.”
From where I stand, participants and partners in the project are rightfully optimistic about where the next stage of the Fens Transition Lab is heading. The challenge for the next workshops of phase 2 is now to identify those ideas with potential for transformational, regenerative impact, and outline how these could be replicated at scale.
Vivek Govil, project lead at Fens Transition Lab, seems to have found some ideas to be excited about as Fens Transition Lab pushes into its new phase.
