Author: Sara Romero (UPM), Teresa Sánchez-Chaparro (UPM), Cecilia López-Pablos (UPM), Gorka Espiau (ALC), Mónica Oviedo (Iberdrola) Nayla Saniour (UPM)
Editted by: Beatriz Martínez (UPM)
How to achieve the socio-productive transformation of a territory towards a more sustainable model?
The Lada and Velilla Social Innovation Platform aimed to promote the collaboration between companies, public entities and the population living and working in the region of Lada (Valle del Nalón, Asturias) and Velilla del Río Carrión (Palencia) in order to unlock the just transition of the area after the closing down of a thermal coal plant.
The impact on employment of the closure of thermal power plants in Spain amounts to approximately 1,800 jobs at the national level, being in some cases the main source of income for the municipalities in which they are located. The necessity to meet the objectives of the European Green Deal and to mitigate climate change involves a complex process: in addition to the direct loss of jobs, the cloure cause a loss of productive system assosiated as well, and its indirect jobs created. Besides, it aggravated the phenomenon of depopulation, which many of these municipalities suffer.
The Lada and Velilla Innovation Platform was set up in response to the closing of coal thermal plants to facilitate the just transition of the region. Its goal was to bring together key stakeholders (most importantly the affected communities, the energy company and local and regional government agencies) to co-design a portfolio of initiatives that enabled the region to move away from a coal-centric socio-economic model towards decarbonization and long-term resilience, in line with the aspirations and perceptions of the people who live and work there
The multi-agent platform was promoted by Iberdrola, (a global energy company, the number-one producer of wind power, and one of the world's biggest electricity utilities by market capitalisation), the Innovation and Technology for Human Development Centre of the Technical University of Madrid, and the Agirre Lehendakaria Center for Social and Political Studies of the Basque Country University
An innovate approach
To systemically address the Just Transition challenge, the Platform has focused on the following activities or stages of the open innovation process:
- Mapping actors and initiatives (in 5 different levels) in the territory.
- Performing a Deep Listening Processes, including interviews and collective sensemaking sessions
- Co-creating process including co-design and user-focused open innovation to unleash, connect and identified initiatives
- Co-creating a portfolio of interconnected initiatives that respond to the diversity of visions, actors and commitments, including small scale innovative business model initiatives and large-scale public-private initiatives, new public services or new regulation
In Lada's case, the portfolio is made up of these areas of opportunity: food systems, energy, training, health, recycling, regulation, financing and green jobs.
In order to carry out a platform of this type among several organizations and which in turn has the vocation to include other actors, it is necessary to have a governance system in place. In this case, They opted for a distributed governance system. This means that there is no traditional hierarchical structure, and decisions are made in a shared way and information is available to all organizations
Main positive lessons
- The open approach reinforces the multi-agent collaboration among different agents involved in the transition of the regions.
Main barriers found
- Social/governance: lack of proactivity and leadership of local agents in the territory
- Social: perception that “sustainability” or “energy transition” takes away jobs and is not worth it.
- Organisational: administrative barriers, lack of proper institutional support – especially for more innovative or experimental initiatives
- Social/cultural: In the case of Lada, a shared underlying narrative was identified that “institutions and companies are indebted to the territory
Potential for reapplication and scale-up
Preliminary analyses are being carried out on the potential for scaling up or transfer, through the identification of lessons learned and proven procedures that have worked under the framework of the initiative of the Open Innovation Platform. The following critical elements can be anticipated for replication of the Open Innovation Platform practices elsewhere:
- Train the listening team, making a combination of expert capacities in social and ethnographic research, and local capacities that know the territory in depth.
- Involve key actors in the co-creation process, both those audiences that are not usually listened to, and those linked to the decision making that will be required to advance the process of change pursued.
- Share learning from the process with peers who are implementing similar strategies in other contexts, so that the exchange of learning and failures is as immediate as possible.
Photos extracted from the official website: https://plataformainnovacion.com/