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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-23426 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Mehl, Lena, van Stegen, Viktoria |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), Malmö universitet/Kultur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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