Climate change is one of the most important challenges of today’s societies and poses serious global threats on the world’s environment and societal structures (UN, n.a.b). Providing a novel and adaptive approach to lead and organize for sustainability are self-organized movements (Atkinson et al., 2018). One of those is the Transition movement, which tries to counter the twin threats of climate change and peak oil with local, community-led, bottom-up action. This research aims to explore leadership in self-organized movements at the example of the Transition movement by collecting and analyzing leader’s perceptions about leadership, its relevance but also challenges within the Danish and Swedish Transition region. Hence, a qualitative approach is used. Even though leadership plays a subordinate role in the minds of the leaders, who see it as informal and relate it to tasks of coordination and empowerment, it is evident and present in all of the movements actions. Leadership can thus be considered as relevant and of importance for the movements development and for self-organized movements in general with a community-centered approach. It is also shown that the intangible leadership perception in the Transition movement can pose challenges in relation to systemic boundaries, engaging people and acquiring funds which can collide with the core values of the movement. Nevertheless, self-organization in connection with leadership findings of this study present a way to lead and organize for sustainability.

There is growing consensus that humanity is being confronted with a sustainability challenge of which the severity has never been known to modern man. This pressing situation is demanding solutions and alternatives to change the path of society. At the community level, grassroots movements have emerged around the world as a way of striving to develop local sustainability.  This research studies the Transition Movement, a popular, global community-based movement. The aim of this study is to evaluate if a Transition Initiative is effective in moving a local community towards sustainability. The definition of sustainability used in the research is taken from the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) which comprises of eight sustainability principles (SPs); three ecological SPs and five social SPs. To this end, an analytical-evaluative case study of a single Transition Initiative was conducted in which semi-structured interviews, a survey and document analysis were all use as sources of information. The researchers chose a small-scale Transition Initiative, conducting the case study on the village of Ungersheim, France. The results revealed that the actions of Transition are contributing to progressing Ungersheim towards sustainability, both socially and ecologically. The research also revealed how the Transition is being done and what critical factors allowed for success. The study finally deduces a set of strategic guidelines that may be used for further longitudinal research cross-evaluating Ungersheim to other small-scale community transitions.

When the world becomes drowned in multiple global problems and citizens do not see any real progressive solutions from their governments, they take the initiative in their own hands and start changing the world on their own. The Transition Town movement was born this way. It is a social movement which aims at building resilient local communities in response to climate change, peak oil and an unfair ecologically destructive economic system which is probably soon to break down. As a potentially strong actor of future social change, it is worth studying emerging local movements in Europe, and hopefully identifying new potentials for success of these grass-root innovations.The study, thus, aims to investigate the relation between the participants of the Transition Movement Sweden and the supranational/intergovernmental entity EU, which plays one of the key roles in economic, environmental and social aspects of Swedish citizens. By conducting interviews with participants of the movement in several Swedish cities, the nature of this relationship is being explored. Using the theory of Multi-Institutional Politics Approach the case study explains the connection between the movement and the EU.