The urgent need to tackle human-induced climate change, massive pollution and unsustainable development has never before been such a prominent feature of contemporary political debate. The European Union (EU) is attempting to shift the way human development is conceived and practiced by subscribing to the seventeen goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and has stressed the necessity of a coalition of governments, supranational institutions, citizens and civil society actors engaged in grassroots-activities. These include producer and consumer cooperatives , participatory municipal budgeting , community and urban gardens , food sovereignty initiatives, Time Banks, Transition Towns and ecovillages. In an historical moment where citizens of the world are called to take action to face ‘multiple crises´, research into these initiatives is crucially important and timely. They constitute, in fact, ‘glocal’ laboratories, real utopias where citizens are engaging in prefiguring a more inclusive, just and fair society through the experimentation with new social practices, the enhancement of social power and the imagination of alternative futures.
‘Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change’ (EcoLabSS) is conceived as a project aiming at producing a theoretically and methodologically innovative study of one of these grassroots initiatives: the ecovillage movement. Theoretically, the goal of EcoLabSS is to develop an original analytical framework based on the conceptualization of ´community-based, prefigurative social movements´. Empirically, EcoLabSS is conceived a multi-level and mixed-method project combining the comparative study of two local ecovillages in Denmark and Italy with a systematic analysis of the actions and networks of the transnational organization Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). To date around 10,000 ecovillages have been documented in both the global North and South in many different spatial contexts, be it urban neighbourhoods, rural communities or traditional villages. The majority of ecovillages around the world belong to GEN. Founded in 1995, GEN supports the activities of ecovillages around the world and acts as an international spokesman reaching out to governments, NGOs, supranational organizations and broader society.
The first part of the research programme revolved around the systematic mapping of the existing literature on community-based, grassroots initiatives. This part was complemented by a preliminary exploration of the existing literature on the concept of prefigurative politics produced since the North-Atlantic financial recession of 2008-2009. The empirical part focused on three interrelated and mutually informing levels: the micro-individual level, the meso-community level, and the macro-societal level. To understand and conceptualize prefigurative movements and their potential to foster sustainability and social change, in fact, it is necessary to analyze how individual motivations, biographies and life trajectories shape prefigurative practices and visions at the collective level, and how the latter, in turn, are scaled-up and diffused into mainstream society. The review of the literature and the empirical work have been then deployed to develop the analytical framework centred on the path-breaking definition of ´community-based, prefigurative movements´.
