Learning from success—Toward evidence-informed sustainability transitions in communities

• Transition Towns and other types of small-scale community sustainability initiatives have greatly increased over the past decade.
• Though successful in number it is unclear if and how initiatives are effective at driving communities toward sustainability.
• We propose an evaluative framework to guide identification of success factors with respect to sustainability outcomes.
• We identify success factors including governance, management and partnerships in a case study of Ashton Hayes.
• The framework facilitates knowledge accumulation and synthesis across cases to support effective practices.

Driven by concerns over the long-term viability and integrity of their communities people around the world initiate transitions toward sustainability on various levels of society. A particular segment of these initiatives are in small, place-based communities. Each initiative presents learning opportunities to build robust transitions that may contribute to progress toward a sustainable society in general. Little empirical research has been conducted on how the transition context and process lead to particular outcomes. This article presents an analytical-evaluative framework for appraising the sustainability of transition outcomes and reconstructing transition pathways in order to identify critical success factors. Ashton Hayes in the U.K. serves as an illustrative case study. The framework may be used for planning and design of transitions, as well as for conducting cross-case comparisons on how transitions work. The ultimate goal is to derive, accumulated over many studies, evidence-informed guidelines to improve the effectiveness of transitions.