"Die Transformation entscheidet sich vor Ort" — the transformation is decided locally.
That was the key statement of a senior official from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Change at a conference I helped design and facilitate two years ago for the German government, the Regionenkonferenz on the energy transition. It brought together federal ministers and government representatives with executives from municipalities and regions, those shaping the energy transition on the ground, to increase understanding of each other and explore next practical steps. The insight behind the senior official’s statement was this: While federal politics can shape the framework conditions for a transition, local and municipal actors are decisive for its traction, speed, and acceptance. The Regionenkonferenz enabled learning in two directions: for municipal leaders to better navigate the different schemes (such as funding and regulation) while driving local transformation, and for representatives of federal ministries to better understand local implementation realities and potentially adapt the policy framework.
Recently, I was reminded of this insight when I attended the European Learning Summit of Bioregions and Landscapes in Romania. Organised by Commonland and Bioregional Weaving Labs, it brought together remarkable leaders shaping 27 bioregions and landscapes across Europe — people leading efforts to restore landscapes and contribute to a regenerative relationship with nature. The issues discussed were extremely practical: How do we influence the dominant incentive systems for farmers? How can we host conversations between actors who fundamentally disagree, organic farmers, conservationists, conventional large-scale farmers, and local municipalities along specific watersheds that need to align on water use and regulation?
Bioregional Leaders at the European Learning Summit in Romania. Photo credit: Miles Rouse from Commonland.
A week later, Natasha Hulst, a portfolio weaver in the Delta Bioregion in the Netherlands captured something deeper in a LinkedIn post:
"Through it all, bioregioning shows itself as a project of peace. Not isolationism, but interdependence. Not retreat, but resilience grounded in place."
Place-based systems change roots transformative efforts in specific communities, landscapes, and regions — the places where people share not just a geography but a common stake in how that place is shaped and governed now and in the future. It is needed today because the large-scale crises of our time — climate disruption, rising polarisation, landscapes being transformed by energy transitions — are experienced as local realities, yet most responses remain top-down and distant, leaving people feeling that change happens to them rather than by them. This erodes something essential: the sense that participation matters, that institutions can function, that positive change is possible.
Place-based work can help to rebuild that sense through tangible experience of collective agency. When diverse actors in a specific place find ways to work together through their differences and shape the course of their community or landscape, they discover that change can be real, and they are getting a taste of democracy functioning.
A particularly interesting initiative in this regard is the Pride in Place programme, a £5 billion UK government initiative aimed at reviving local communities and high streets over ten years, starting in 2025/26. It empowers local Neighbourhood Boards to spend up to £20 million per area on priorities including town centre regeneration, tackling crime, and improving community assets. What is inspiring is its emphasis on local collective agency — handing decision-making to communities and recognising the decisive role neighbourhoods play in how well people feel integrated into societal structures, and ultimately, how well they accept and trust democratic institutions. In Germany, the Allianz der Gestalter:innen aims to strengthen local and regional change agents and solutions, so that federal policymakers can learn from this.
But what does it actually take to build that resilience grounded in place? In my observation, three capacities are essential.
Transformative change at the local level requires bringing together actors who often have fundamentally different, even opposed, interests and creating the conditions for them to understand each other and find ways to work together rather than retreat into preconceived positions.
During the European Learning Summit of Bioregions and Landscapes in Romania, I asked leaders from different bioregions across Europe what they struggle with currently, and one of the key responses I got was, “How do we convene and facilitate different stakeholders who do not yet agree or trust each other and have different interests?” What often felt manageable was facilitating exchanges among local actors who, to a large degree, are already convinced of a certain trajectory. For example, more regenerative farming practices. On the other hand, how to create a container for unlike-minded actors along a shared watershed, including organic farmers, traditional large-scale farmers, environmental groups, water-intensive industries, and the different municipalities, is less manageable and often feels insurmountable.
A central element of this work is increasing role awareness among different stakeholders. Different government functions are involved in policy implementation, and each has needs that must be met for them to play their role effectively. Farmers and environmental groups also have divergent imperatives, but both can play constructive roles in effective, just, and sustainable watershed management. All these stakeholders view the situation from their own perspectives and hold preconceived opinions and projections about one another. This is normal, but it doesn’t have to block change. Creating the conditions in which all parties recognise that each has a part to play is essential and far from easy.
Local resilience also requires the capacity to look ahead collectively, to imagine what different futures might look like, to work through the tensions those futures reveal, and to begin acting together in the face of deep uncertainty.
Participants during one of the sessions of Our Landscapes.
In Denmark, the initiative Our Landscapes is supporting local communities to do exactly this — imagine possible futures, work through tensions, and begin acting together in the face of climate change and energy transitions. The longer-term ambition is for Denmark to become a living learning space for landscape transformation, showing how local collective agency can complement national policies. In times of high polarisation, where more and more people find it hard to engage with those outside their own bubble, this work becomes even more important.
A third capacity is perhaps the most fundamental, rebuilding the sense that people can shape their own future. In times of rising cynicism about institutions and growing scepticism about whether positive change is even possible, this is not a soft outcome; it is the precondition for everything else. Without it, the best-designed dialogues and the most ambitious future visions remain fragile. With it, communities become active agents of transformation rather than its reluctant subjects.
In the Beyond 1.5 Transformation Hub, our non-profit Reos Institute is supporting place-based initiatives such as Our Landscapes to move beyond concern and paralysis through a transformative journey with four essential shifts:
The initiative is based on the belief that supporting the emergence of regenerative economies, while facing the inevitable risks of a changing climate, is the best way to ensure the future well-being of our societies and nature.
Collective agency is often constrained by a lack of resources or authority over how resources are allocated. Many interesting practices are emerging in which local communities also have collective decision-making authority over resource allocation. One example is The Black Systemic Safety Fund, initiated by Impact on Urban Health and facilitated by the Ubele Initiative and Reos Partners. The initiative convened black communities in Lambeth and Southwark not only to explore the most critical safety challenges, but also to jointly decide how to spend £400 000 in their communities.
These three capacities, convening across differences, imagining shared futures, and rebuilding local collective agency, are at the heart of what Reos Partners brings to place-based systems change. Not as abstract methodologies, but as practised responses to the real difficulties of working across deep disagreement and long time horizons.
In this way, place-based work is not only climate work or landscape work. It is democracy work. It is peace work.
And the transformation? It is still decided locally.
David Winter
Senior Consultant at Reos Partners and Chair of the Board of the Reos Institute