Key takeaways from the project underscore the importance of fostering long-term collaborations between technical experts, communities, and institutional partners. By integrating technical innovation with human-centred design, the SUSTENANCE project has not only advanced renewable energy adoption but also established a framework for empowering communities to actively participate in sustainable energy transitions. Moving forward, the lessons learned, and solutions developed provide a solid foundation for addressing future challenges in energy system decarbonization and resilience.
MULTIFILE
One of our most distinctive powers is imagination, our capability to imagine or fantasize about possible futures. Systematic use of imagination can be a powerful method to analyze possible next steps in the present. In 2012, UNESCO coined the term Futures Literacy (plural: the future does not exist, FL), the ability that enables people to understand the role the “futures” play in our behaviour, and expectations. Imagination is a developable skill that allows us to separate expected futures from desired futures using fantasy. FL can be used as a method to achieve the 5 Inner Development Goals: 1. Being (relationship to self), 2. Thinking (cognitive skills), 3. Relating (caring for others and the world), 4. Working together (social skills ) and 5. Tackling (steering the transition). It is argued that using FL can lead to paradogical insights!
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This article reports on qualitative research among 48 social professionals, managers and policymakers and their perceptions of activating citizenship, social work roles and responsibilities, carried out in Utrecht and Tartu. Professionals from both countries agreed to the idea of activating citizenship but stressing the perspective of personalised or lived citizenship, each person to his own capacities and embedded in the personal context. Nearly all respondents were critical about the recognition of social workers as a full profession, about the new management way of steering social work and about cooperation between different groups of professionals and services. Although both countries have quite different historical and cultural backgrounds, the authors found many similarities among social workers regarding their ideas on support, participation and commitment to the people they work for and work with. International research projects contribute to a more strongly recognised social work theory and social work practice by getting a better understanding, in particular of the way social work adapts to different contexts but from a highly recognisable international discourse within social work.
