Nevelina Pachova & Adriana Veran
People and places at the crossroads of change
In the province of León in Spain, the aftermath of the coal phase-out has left once thriving communities grappling with a harsh reality. Previously, wealthy and important coal mining industries in the region attracted people with stable, well-paying jobs that supported bustling towns filled with shops, services, leisure spots, and cultural life. Today, the remaining residents face a vastly different reality, struggling to find employment and feeling a palpable lack of vitality in their towns.
Many locals are waiting for another big industry to come to the region and revive their towns by creating jobs en masse. Others, however, especially women, young people and residents who did not partake in the coal-based economy directly, see change as an opportunity to learn new skills, explore new possibilities for personal and professional development and take a more active role in shaping the future of their towns.
Lending a friendly ear one can hear multiple micro-visions of change. Setting up a cheese or a cake-making business, a tree nursery or a chestnut cooperative, engaging people in restoring local resources, traditions, and skills, or addressing collectively shared needs, such as access to transportation, care, entertainment or hope are some examples of those. Most micro-visions, however, are rarely heard, either in formal just transitions planning or in informal discourses, which tend to serve as outlets of accumulated despair, frustration and pain.
Formal visions and approaches to enabling a just transition
National and regional just transition plans and associated public responses to the challenges of decarbonization in post-mining regions, such as León, focus on supporting large scale investments in clean energy development, economic restructuring, land restoration and related reskilling programs as core instruments for helping individuals deal with the process of change. Fabero Verde XII, a blended training and employment program, subsidized by the Public Employment Service of Castilla y León and promoted by the Municipality of Fabero, a former coal mining town in the province of León, is an example of such public responses to change. In the framework of the program, over the course of a year, unemployed people are trained in gardening and forestry, splitting their time between learning and applying these new skills in local green spaces, reforestation efforts, and forest management for the local government.
The program equips the participants with a wide range of skills that they can use to obtain employment in land restoration projects, forest management and related initiatives often financed through related just transition funds. Such opportunities, however, are often short-term, seasonal or further away from the towns where participants live. At the same time, making the jump from a training to starting your own business is not an easy and straightforward step. It takes time, resources and courage, alongside with a plethora of administrative and managerial knowledge and skills, and networks needed to both make things work and help one bear the costs if they don’t.
Fostering social entrepreneurship by enabling micro-visions of change
Seeing the knowledge, motivation and skills, such as those provided by the Fabero Verde XII program, as useful resources to meet local community rather than industry needs and enabling access to small funds for experimentation with community-driven ideas for change, however, could help to stimulate the emergence of bottom-up social entrepreneurship. QUERCUS, a non-for-profit organization established by some of the participants of the Fabero Verde XII program is an example of that. Set up as a follow-up to a discussion on what a just transition in the context of Fabero could look like and how the course participants could contribute to it, the initiative came into being to give shape and life to some of the shared micro-visions of change that emerged.
Named after a tree found in the region, QUERCUS was established in June 2024 and has since organized a series of community events aimed at engaging children in hands-on actions that contribute to their community and environment. Those include painting a magical garden on the walls of a local school, learning how to separate garbage and how to make cheese. Rebuilding a forest path, planting a vegetable garden in a home for the elderly together with the children, and establishing a local cooperative farm as a way of sustaining the initiative are among the multiple plans of the founders of QUERCUS.
The good news is they are not alone. Community visioning, supported by seed funds for community action to follow-up on the emergent micro-visions of change, have awoken interest and mobilized actions among other formal and informal community groups left out of the formal plans for a just transition and related funding opportunities across six other study regions included in the BOLSTER project. Results from the action research and the lessons that can be drawn from them are still unfolding but one thing is clear. People living in regions affected by decarbonization have the ideas, capacities and motivation to take an active role in rebuilding their communities and towns. What is lacking are the mechanisms and resources to give micro-visions a chance to emerge and a possibility to evolve into place-based capacities and approaches for social innovation and transformative change.
