Co-Creating the Green Transition: Deepening Democracy through University-City Partnerships

Researchers at University College Cork, Ireland, are currently contributing to the pan European GreenInCities project which aims to build a new co-creative approach for implementing nature-based solutions in deprived urban regeneration areas for collaborative climate change mitigation and adaptation, while also contributing to the European Green Deal and other EU policies. The local project aims to develop participatory co-creation processes for planning, implementing and monitoring urban interventions in one such area in Cork city. Such projects offer immense potential for co-creating the transformative processes that will be necessary for societies to remain within safe socio-ecological boundaries. There are also increasing concerns, however, that many such initiatives – often themselves initiated within the European Green Deal framework – operate within an ever-narrowing structure that aligns ecological imperatives with market rationality, technological innovation, and economic growth, greatly limiting the range of possibilities and imaginaries available to community participants when it comes to socio-ecological topics. Consequently, responses to ecological and climate-related problems are generally only considered feasible if simultaneously stimulating economic production and perpetual growth – a combination the evidence shows to be entirely unfeasible.

With this in mind, we argue that university-based researchers have the opportunity to provide a critical lens through which to develop more liberatory, community-based, and participatory processes as tools for collaboration and collective action – intentionally generating visions that are bottom-up, long-term, expansive, and solutions-driven. Aside from the opportunities for solidarity, mutual support and shared learning these offer the communities involved, such models offer potential to create the political agency and sustained engagement required to overcome the aforementioned challenges facing deliberative processes at community level. Fundamentally, if we are to learn the lessons of previous decades, and avert a collective ecocide, a deep democratisation of responses to our current polycrises will be essential.