Scotland Transition Lab: our first steps
As North Star Transition holds the initial meeting of Scotland Transition Lab, Arnav Jain explores the collaboration and co-operation with the University of Glasgow that has enabled this initiative to commence.
In our bid to explore a world that is regenerative rather than degenerative, North Star Transition is launching Scotland Transition Lab, in collaboration with the Global Soil Health Programme at the University of Glasgow. Taking inspiration from our successful Wales Transition Lab model, this will be a new initiative aiming to bring together leaders, researchers and practitioners with the foresight and creativity to explore the possibilities that lie beyond the silos of organisational and sectoral boundaries. Our hope is to find a sufficiently ambitious and engaging set of shared goals for Scotland around which we can collaboratively build conversations, strategies, and innovation.
It goes without saying that we face crises on multiple fronts, with climate change, the collapse of biodiversity and eco-systems, and rising social inequality featuring on our daily news pages. Some of the root causes include narrowly defined mental frameworks and institutional silos, which constrain our responses to said challenges and a breakdown in collaborative thinking and problem solving. As a result, as a society, despite thousands of initiatives aiming to address these crises, we continue to see deterioration in key metrics on outcomes that matter, such as the planetary boundaries, or carbon performance.
John Crawford, professor at the University of Glasgow, who leads the Global Soil Health Programme, shared his view on the launch of Scotland Transition Lab: “North Star Transition has a fantastic model in operation in Wales which we are keen to share with Scotland. We believe that co-creating a Scottish Transition Lab provides a potential mechanism to challenge the current status quo on how to manage food and its connections to land, health, environment and financial impacts. We think this approach could be a promising delivery vehicle to bring about systemic change in Scotland and further afield.”
John and his colleagues at the Global Soil Health Programme have been working with Jyoti Banerjee and our team at North Star Transition to co-create Scotland Transition Lab. UCL’s Climate Action Unit, a partner of North Star Transition, is supporting this initiative.
It is evident that the need for a shift in ambition and action addressing the future of soil health, the environment, and the need for systemic change grows every day. Farmers face changing tastes and diet, yet few have the resources to plan and deliver the shifts that will assure the long-term wellbeing of their families, businesses, and the land they farm. Medical practitioners experience the consequences of policy disconnects between food, diet, nutrition, and poverty daily. And biodiversity and soil health continue to decline with the true cost of their negative externalities seemingly omitted from the price we pay for the food we consume.
The fast yet fragile links that tie together the system we live in are under threat. The disconnects that divide the food system from nature, health, and wellbeing are just manifestations of the broader systemic challenges we are living through.
Jyoti Banerjee had this to say on the Scotland Transition Lab, “Scotland does not need another talk shop. We seek shared agency across disconnected participants in the system, and it is this that I hope we can find through our Scotland Transition Lab. The answers we create cannot come from one corner of the system, imposing its view on the rest of the system. At North Star Transition, we are firm in our view that participants from across multiple parts of the global business system will have to learn together, share together, and co-create answers together. We need to grow our sense of collective agency and multi-disciplinary thinking.”
