ICS Working Paper Nº1/2018

ICS W O R K I N G P A P E R S 2018 13 2. Outlining Portugal’s CBI landscape This section outlines the Portuguese CBI landscape and its inherent dynamics, building on a critical review of all available data. After a short introduction, section 2.1. depicts the available information on Portugal’s CBIs. Section 2.2. introduces Portugal’s CBI landscape, section 2.3. offers a critical analysis of the driving forces behind it, and section 2.4. summarizes its key feature and development challenges ahead. Portugal in transition: brief outlook Since the turn of the century, in particular after the financial crisis of 2007/8 and the introduction of the economic adjustment programme in 2010, CBIs in Portugal have increased substantially in number. Yet little is known about their make-up, reach, and rate of survival, or of their future potential as change actors towards socio-ecological transitions. We now address this gap as we identify and organize the available information on Portugal CBIs. At the turn of the century, Portugal still had one of the lowest levels of social mobilization concerning any recognizable form of sustainability transition in Europe (Schmidt et al., 2006). Available data hints at a country-wide growth tendency of such community-based initiatives (CBIs) since 2010 (Marques Balsa et al., 2016), while it doesn’t allow for an accurate quantification of that increase. Nevertheless, transitions to sustainability remains largely absent in Portugal’s public debate (Baumgarten, 2017). In effect, Portuguese CBIs still function outside the public realm, unable to influence the Portuguese political and environmental policy arena, and thus fail to trigger the wider socio-ecological change they advocate. This is problematic insofar as “for sustainability transitions to occur, the local level needs to be transcended so that innovations are able to diffuse“ (Hof et al., 2016: 2). Nevertheless, the socio- institutional landscape towards sustainability transitions in Portugal is changing, largely due to a growing number of action-research projects (e.g. ClimAdaPT.Local; Catalise; PROSEU ((see Annex 2 of Appendix A for a detailed description)) and community-led bottom-up initiatives (e.g. the CBIs Fruta Feia; Trokaki; Cooperativa Verde Perto (ibidem)). All of these focus on either leveraging or implementing sustainability in various contexts. This paper builds on the assumption that CBIs’ potential for socio-ecological transformation in Portugal is undervalued. Portuguese CBIs have rarely been analysed in academia, mostly from a predominantly descriptive standpoint, generating little reflection on their make-up, reach and possible future pathways. 2. 1. Scattered data A thorough review of both international and national literature, academic and non-academic, including dissertations at the doctoral and master’s level, as well as bottom-up organized databases, highlights the scarcity of data on Portuguese CBIs. The large majority of research consists of single case studies that