Something old, something new, something green: community leagues and neighbourhood energy transitions in Edmonton, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102524Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Well-established grassroots organizations may foster sustainability niches.

  • Established structures and familiarity among community members is an asset.

  • Expanding the organization's vision and redistributing resources is a challenge.

  • Location and nature of niches determine their growth and diffusion trajectories.

Abstract

Well-established grassroots structures offer the potential to foster sustainability niches. Among them are community leagues, community-centred and volunteer-driven neighbourhood organizations in Edmonton, Canada, in existence there for over 100 years. We explore how niches have been created within the well-established community league structure to foster and diffuse neighbourhood energy transitions. A qualitative review of community league documents, key-informant interviews, and an online residents' survey inform this inquiry. Findings indicate that grassroots organization like community leagues foster energy transitions by building on existing access to the community, the trust of members, and regime institutions at the local level. However, taking up new roles regarding sustainability also reveals tensions and rigidity within the niche that require institutional reorientation and a new organizational vision. This paper extends the conceptualization of innovative social niches by locating them within well-established community structures.

Introduction

Global warming, climate change, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions are pressing issues facing our planet [1]. Given their scale and global impact, these issues typically elicit large-scale, top-down international and national responses. However, a growing interest exists to understand how local, bottom-up action can contribute towards addressing these global issues [[2], [3], [4]]. Community-based grassroots organizations play an important role in this domain and are identified as innovative social niches with a potential for large-scale sustainability transformations [[5], [6], [7]]. Their initiatives include, but are not limited to, tangible efforts like community-level recycling, community gardening, or low-impact housing. Initiatives also include intangible efforts related to social mobilization and community development [8,9]. Rooted in their communities, grassroots initiatives are typically driven by a need for social and environmental change rather than catering to market economies; they also present an intrinsic diffusion potential for change [5].

Scholarly conceptualization of grassroots-led community action for sustainable transition has largely been based upon new or innovative ideas and social organization that have formed at a grassroots level. Notable examples are Transition Towns [10,11], which started as a response to peak oil. This understanding has widened to include community energy projects that take ownership of producing and/or distributing renewable energy [[12], [13], [14]]. Community energy is a broad term and includes diverse activities, from small-scale self-consumption projects like rooftop solar panels for community or school buildings to large-scale, cooperatively owned wind farms [15,16].

In this paper, we are interested in learning what happens when established grassroots organizations, with long histories in their local communities, like co-operatives, neighbourhood groups, or homeowner associations, adopt and adapt the ideas of energy transition. How are their challenges different from newly formed innovative social niches? Do they present a higher potential for diffusion owing to their well-established position within their community?

This inquiry is rooted in the argument that well-established peers are opinion leaders within their communities and can play a leading role in the diffusion of new ideas [17]. The presence of an existing community spirit and a cooperative culture are identified as desired preconditions for institutionally embedding renewable energy projects in a community [18]. Trust and shared values within existing community institutions and social capital built around such institutions are recognized as important preconditions to initiating community-based renewable energy projects [16,19]. Within the context of an urban neighbourhood, transformational leadership grounded in neighbourhood organizations could anchor a wide range of programs, from neighbourhood regeneration [20] to long-term planning to address climate change [21], to building on the trust and social capital that neighbourhood organizations cultivate over time. On the other hand, niche-building is a contested process resulting in dissonance between ideas and interests within an institutional structure [22]. Established community structures may resist accepting new ideas, visions, and interests [23]. Further, established neighbourhood-scale networks may be exclusionary, leading to loss of trust and participation from the wider community [24].

To explore whether or if established community organizations can become sites for situating sustainability niches, we present the case of community leagues in Edmonton, Canada. Community leagues are a unique community-centred and volunteer-driven organizations that have existed in Edmonton since 1917 [25]. Currently, a network of 161 neighbourhood organizations works to enhance the quality of life in their neighbourhoods [26]. Following an interest in the community towards renewable energy, some community leagues have sought to diffuse the idea by installing solar panels and conducting energy audits of the league-owned neighbourhood community halls [27]. Their aims were to reduce their own utility bills, to make solar energy tangible in the neighbourhood, and to encourage neighbourhood home-owners and local institutions to do the same. In doing so, they have demonstrated leadership in diffusing energy transitions within their neighbourhoods.

Based on the experience of 10 forerunner community leagues in Edmonton, we identify the opportunities and challenges for established community-based institutions in adopting the ideas of energy transition, as well as the diffusion potential of these initiatives. We do so by identifying how leagues created, sustained, and now diffuse green niches. We guide our inquiry with the theoretical framework of Strategic Niche Management (SNM) [28] as it applies to grassroots organizations [29]. Our discussion is based on data we collected through document analysis, self-published data gathered from the leagues' websites, semi-structured interviews with key-informants, and a residents' survey.

Explorations into the possibilities for well-established community organizations like neighbourhood groups and homeowner associations to act as niches to foster and diffuse energy transitions are important. They can serve to widen our understanding of the nature of grassroots initiatives for sustainability and where they can be strategically located. Lessons from this exploration are also relevant for developing innovative niches that overcome intrinsic barriers to diffusion.

We begin by discussing the role of community-based grassroots organizations in socio-technical transitions. We then identify the barriers faced by grassroots organizations in their position as innovative niches. We employ community leagues as a basis of empirical inquiry to understand the similarities and differences between well-established organizations and newly formed innovative niches. Finally, we discuss whether well-established community organizations can lead bottom-up energy transitions.

Section snippets

Grassroots organizations as niches for sustainability transitions

A transition to a low-carbon pathway is understood as a socio-technical process that is not limited to the adoption of new technology; rather, it is a catalyst for societal change involving multiple aspects of the market, knowledge, governance, and culture [30,31]. Further, niches are an important site for theorizing energy transitions as protected places where new ideas and technologies can be fostered [28,31,32]. SNM, in particular, provides a theoretical framework for fostering and managing

Community leagues as grassroots niches

Community leagues are a neighbourhood-based, volunteer-driven type of organization in Edmonton, Canada [25]. During the early 1900s, neighbourhoods in Edmonton faced various problems, such as lack of housing, infrastructure, and organization. To address these issues, the city's industrial commissioner brought together residents in his neighbourhood, forming the Crestwood Community League [25]. Soon after its formation, eight other community leagues were formed in the city, which then

Methods

This paper adopts a case study approach to examine a contemporary phenomenon embedded in a real-life context [63]. This involves understanding how sustainability niches were formed within the well-established structure of community leagues and the intrinsic and diffusion challenges they faced in doing so. At the time of initiating this research (2019), 21 leagues across Edmonton had either installed a solar panel and/or conducted an energy audit of their community building (see Fig. 2 for

Establishing, sustaining and diffusing sustainability niches

To understand the intrinsic challenges and opportunities of establishing sustainability niches within the community leagues' structure, we divide this section into three parts. The first two subsections elaborate on the process of establishing sustainability niches and sustaining the momentum around them. The third subsection presents the diffusion strategies adopted to replicate sustainability niches and to popularize the program among neighbourhood residents.

Discussion

Niches are protective spaces for fostering the ideas of sustainability transition [28,35]; community-based grassroots organizations are an example of innovative social niches that do this [5,12]. However, we argue that not all grassroots niches are equal, and the nature and positioning of a grassroots niche influences the opportunities and challenges it might have. We are particularly interested in well-established communities as locations for fostering sustainability transitions. In this

Conclusion

This paper began by exploring the potential of well-established community organizations as sites to foster sustainability niches. An existing organizational structure, proximity to the community, and trust of community members guided this investigation. The case of neighbourhood organizations called community leagues in Edmonton, Canada, was revealing and informative because of its century-old presence in Edmonton's neighbourhoods and its recent foray into adopting and promoting sustainability

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Green Leagues program at the EFCL, Edmonton for their support in providing background data for this research, the volunteers and residents who participated in the interviews and survey and Abhimanyu Jamwal and Shaival Gajjar for assisting with the data collection. We would also like to thank the five anonymous reviewers who provided valuable insights for improving this paper. The research has been funded through the Future Energy Systems, University of Alberta supported by the

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