From our member Bruno Lasnier, MES France.

As part of its strategic project for 2019 – 2022 to support the development of SSE in France, MES France is committed to four priority areas of cooperation between its members to support the necessary ecological and solidarity-based transition of our society.

It is around one of these projects: Social and citizen innovation for the economic development of territories, that we are launching, in partnership with the College of World Studies, a research-action project on the methods of animation of a territorial approach.

For several years now, the MES member networks have been supporting or participating in the emergence of innovative economic development actions at the territorial level with a common challenge: the active participation of citizens. In this way, they encourage the emergence of innovations that mobilise new engineering, economic models, working methods, alliances of actors, stakeholders, etc. and address the challenges of the energy transition, new forms of mobility, cohousing, short food circuits, new forms of solidarity and employment, cultural rights or common….

In a desire to develop the capacity of citizens and public and private actors to cooperate for an economic development that meets the specific challenges of each territory, the support methods encourage a synergy of resources and promote the emergence of initiatives built collectively with a view to sustainable development.

However, these experiences have not yet benefited, within the movement, from capitalisation and pooling on a national scale. At a time when several actions are emerging at the national level: from the study-action “Collective dynamics of transition in territories”. from the Labo de l’ESS, Carrefour des Innovations Sociales or Les Fabriques de Transition, it is important that the MES contributes to feed these approaches with its experiences and know-how.

An action plan has been collectively elaborated around the realisation, over the period of the strategic project, of an action research co-constructed with the College of Global Studies in three phases:

• The capitalisation of the tools and methods developed through our practices and the construction of a community of coaches within the logic of a learning community and the construction of a service offer, based on a cycle of six two-day learning visits and six days of cooperation and exchanges supervised by a researcher in order to co-construct the valorisation of our knowledge.
• Experimentation on new territories, based on the service offer and resources capitalised in Phase 1 in the framework of action research in order to place our approach in a framework of formalisation and dissemination of knowledge.
• Dissemination of our work in a logic of cooperation and exchange of knowledge with all the actors working on this subject in order to nourish, beyond our network, an ecosystem of ecological transition and solidarity of the territories.
  Financing was acquired in 2020, from the FPH and the Fondation du Crédit Coopératif to carry out phase 1 and launch phase 2 of this project.