Leading Community Projects for Sustainable Innovation.
Research by Dr Dicle Kortantamer
With the support of
Dr Nick Marshall & Dr Rebecca Vine
A collaboration between Brighton and Sussex Universities
This research aims to advance understandings of effective forms and practices of leadership in vanguard community projects concerned with generating novel solutions to sustainability issues. These projects present significant opportunities for delivering path-breaking innovations that can accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon society. They are also likely to create other social and financial benefits such as helping bring together local people and empower them to tackle issues that are important to them, and creating new jobs. As such, vanguard community projects have an important role to play in achieving the UK government’s commitment of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and a sustainable and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vanguard community projects often lack the clear authority relations, roles and responsibilities of projects governed by established organisations, rely on voluntary contributions and privilege social and environmental outcomes over economic concerns. These projects tend to navigate the diverse and potentially conflicting interests, norms and values of the community they serve and the evolving niche that protects them from the institutional pressures for competition. Despite extensive research on leadership, relatively little is known about the forms and practices of leadership that emerge in problem-based modes of organising within ambiguous, dynamic and pluralistic settings. This research intends to contribute to addressing this knowledge gap.
To do this, the research combines the literature on leadership and sustainability transitions. Recognising the importance of sensemaking and the possibility of collective forms of leadership in ambiguous and pluralistic settings, the research departs from the mainstream approaches to studying leadership that focus on understanding the competencies and styles of individuals that allow them to be effective in a formal leadership role or emerge as leaders. Instead, an integrated perspective of leadership is developed by drawing on social theories of practice and the meaning-making role of agency. In this formulation, leadership is viewed as the web of activities that seek to produce a common interpretation of the project vision, the project collective and the project learning. Accordingly, the research focuses on understanding how these activities are achieved, who contributes to these activities when and how, and what their consequences are for the project and beyond.
Evidence from an ethnographically-inspired case study of a vanguard community energy project in Sussex is being used to develop this perspective into a conceptual framework outlining effective forms and practices of leadership. Following an engaged scholarship approach, the researcher and key project participants have been working together to define the research problem and the research design, to interpret findings and translate them into a conceptual framework.
The insights and evidence generated by the research will provide guidance to community members and local governments about effective ways of leading community projects, and inform policy makers and stakeholders involved in central government’s policy making about the community energy sector and government engagement with the broader civil society. Additionally, the evidence-based conceptual framework will potentially inform the government’s project delivery capability framework as well as government learning and development activities concerned with developing project delivery and leadership capabilities. The theoretical explanations offered will be of interest to a broad set of scholars engaged in understanding leadership, sustainability transitions and projects.