Building bridges not borders: how (g)local environmental movements are changing the future
How can you contribute to building a sustainable future? During the past year, new global citizen movements have taken the streets to demand immediate action on climate change. Meanwhile, other loosely connected actors are calling for the inclusion of nature’s rights in the practice of law. Locally, self-organized communities are taking the matter into their own hands building concrete alternatives of sustainable forms of living.
In this workshop, we explore how different forms of sustainable organising contribute to transformative processes of societal change. We discuss the underlying logics and different strategies through which each of these movement urge for change. What are the possibilities of collaboration when people with diverging backgrounds come together to organize sustainable transformations?
The workshop include three presentations:
1) Overview of different g(local) environmental movements (Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes);
2) Collaborative processes of change (Sanne Bor);
3) Hands-on experiences from the rights of nature movement and glocal transition network (Pella Thiel).
The presentations are followed by interactive group discussions about how to build bridges across movements; and how to organize transformative change beyond borders.
The workshop is animated by Sanne Bor, Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes, Pella Thiel.
Sanne Bor holds a PhD in Management and Organization. Her work focuses on collaboration among organizations, particularly in situations where collaboration is essential to solve the big challenges we meet in today's world. She works on helping organizations to collaborate better, with the aim to find fairer, wiser and better solutions to these big societal challenges. At Hanken School of Economics she works on the STN-funded CORE project, where she helps finding tools for collaborative development of solutions to environmental challenges. At LUT she works on the STN-funded PackageHeroes project, where she focuses on finding ways for overcoming barriers to stimulate collaboration between organizations to enhance the transition from plastic to non-plastic package solutions. Her research interests also include meta-organizations, organizations of organizations, and developing theory to understand this type of organization better. Sanne is also interested in topics related to self-steering and collective decision-making more generally. Sanne has published in Management Inquiry and Administrative Science. Currently, she serves as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Inter-Organizational Collaboration at the British Academy of Management.
Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes holds a PhD in Supply Chain Management and Social Responsibility. Her work is currently focused on the politics and organization of sustainable food and alternative food networks. Her research interests also include the organizational practices and governance of corporate-community relations in territories marked by extractive economic operations, including processes of legitimation and contestation, and the impacts of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices on community self-organisation. Maria has published in journals such as Geoforum, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Cleaner Production, and Journal of Rural Studies.
Pella Thiel works with relational, systemic activism, change processes and leadership för a society in harmony with nature. She is a co-founder and board member of the Swedish Transition Network, End Ecocide Sweden, Save the Rainforest Sweden and the swedish Network for Rights of Nature. She coordinated the first two Rights of Nature Conferences in Sweden. She has edited two books on nature interpretation and is currently working on a book on rights of nature. Pella has an MSc in Ecology from Stockholm University with the thesis on rainforest restoration in Ecuador. She enjoys pigs, her greenhouse (which has been under construction for four years) and having her hands in the soil at the smallholding in the archipelago of Stockholm where she lives. She is part of the eco-psychology/activist NGO Lodyn, UN Harmony with Nature initiative and the Common cause international network.