CReating Innovative Sustainability Pathways – CRISP

Project Summary Description


Climate Change is a serious problem that will affect us for many decades to come. Across the world, we have ambitious targets to help us reduce our carbon emissions towards a low-carbon world, but often, we don’t quite know how such a world will look like and how to get there. The core objective of CRISP is to identify potential paths to engaging on an integrated effort to support the transition to a sustainable, low carbon Europe. This will be done using a scenario and back-casting approach that explicitly discerns individuals, organisations and the collective (societal and economic organisation), addresses the interaction of agency and structure, and analyses from there how individuals and collectives can be engaged on sustainable paths, and how new policy mixes and co-operation mechanisms can overcome barriers to change. Against this background, the project structure is as follows:

  • We plan to build upon theories that explicitly link individual and organizational agency with structure. Next to analysing theories that help understand agency at individual level, we will use theories that give insight in the behaviour of complex systems and the role of agents in it. (Workpackage 1(WP1)).
  • We will analyse practical (past) cases of change with this framework (WP2 and WP3). Next to the theoretical insights, this will give additional understanding from practice in the role of agency and structure and related barriers, drivers and pathways of change (WP4).
  • We will apply novel participatory scenario techniques, most notably transition scenario and back-casting methodologies, to develop sustainability visions (WP5) and transition paths (WP6). These novel scenario methodologies allow for specific analysis of processes in transition paths and the factors that drive and hinder such transitions (WP7). Work Package 5 and 6 will involve pupils as representatives of the future scenarios CRISP will develop, as well as social networking and video dissemination sites for the participation and evaluation stages.
  • Finally, on the basis of the analysis of the theoretical basis and cases (WP4) and the results of the scenario/back-casting exercise (WP7), the core question of the call can be answered: how to engage individuals and collectives on sustainable paths; what is needed in order to address the barriers and make the most of the drivers for sustainable development in terms of a) new policy mixes and b) new and innovative mechanisms for cooperation and partnerships between actors in public, private sector and the civil society.

The project is completed by WPs on Management and Dissemination. The project is executed by a renowned team of experts familiar with behavioural-, innovation and transition and innovation theories, participative scenario and backcasting exercises and policy assessment. The team is carefully selected from partners from Hungary, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Lithuania and the UK - quite different cultural backgrounds to make full use of the diversity in the ‘Laboratory of Europe’. The impact of the findings of the project is enhanced by its strong participatory approach and an elaborated dissemination program that includes a policy stakeholder panel.

CRISP meeting in Surrey, United Kingdom, 1-3 March, 2011

CRISP meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, 29-31, May 2011

CRISP meeting in Delft, Netherlands, 19-20, September 2011