‘Creating our plan required everyone to get involved, from wealthy neighbours, to the kids coming over on boats from Africa, to the farmers who grow the food, to the workers and owners of the factories down the hill, to the local and regional politicians… Everyone has a role to play, and they need to play it.’
Community Facilitator: Francesc Canalías, Director of the Regional Department of the Environment and Public Health
Project: Fem Garrotxa
Website: https://resilience.earth/project/fem-garrotxa/
Location: La Garrotxa, Catalunya, Spain
Funding: From regional government
Local context: Garrotxa is a country in Girona, Catalonia. Its population is 56,000, more than half of them in the capital city of Olot.
Goals: To co-produce and co-implement a Regional Strategic Plan for Territorial Resilience, through wide-spread and citizen-led participation.
Process: At the start they set the goal of engaging 11% of the local population in co-creating the resilience plan, and they achieved it. The key stages were:
1. Participatory Diagnosis – extensive questionnaire to 2200 people
2. Participatory Co-creation of Strategies – 16 public meetings with over 600 participants, which produced nearly 1000 distinct proposals
3. Compilation of Draft Strategic Plan
4. Technical & Citizen Review of Strategic Plan – 17 sessions with experts from the public sector, private sector and third sector to review the draft strategic plan.
5. Participatory Review and Validation of Plan – Large participatory sessions to do a community review of the strategic plan and a presentation to the 21 mayors of the region.
6. Collective Identification of Next Steps – In this public event, people were identified as stewards for each of the 21 objectives. Participants also developed detailed plans for 32 of the 79 actions.
7. Implementation of the Strategic Plan ‘Let’s Make Garrotxa Resilient Together’
Insights: It is about getting together and making sure everyone has a say in what pertains to them, what they can speak to. For example, during the meeting on Dignified Employment, we had big industry leaders at the same table with union leaders and people from the artisans’ network and the cooperatives’ network. It was not easy to do, as there were many points of tension, however, we used a consent-based approach, which made the design and decision-making process easier. And this also has meant a huge buy-in by people who would not necessarily participate in this kind of process. But they had to, because everyone else was, and they didn’t want to be left out.
This is a case study from the Community Climate Coaches (CCC) Erasmus+ project, where we highlight the work of one Coach. Find out more about this type of coaching, how to become one and resources for this journey here.
CCC is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. Proj. ref.: 2020-1-IE01-KA204-066023
