The Local Climate Contract. How to Foster Co-response-Ability for Sustainable Societal Transformation

This work explores how designerly practices drawing from embodied sensemaking, can foster actionable systemic perspectives that allow for co-response-ability in the formulation of a Climate City Contract in the city of Umeå, Sweden. The paper describes the design and facilitation process of 3 cross-disciplinary roundtable conversations that build on notions of thriving together, making kin and commoning. The main aim is to contribute to creating alternative collaborative practices that develop means to acknowledge the complexity of — and our entanglement with — systemic challenges. Such practices are necessary for addressing the mission-driven approach that the public sector in Europe is adopting. The outcomes of this research point toward three elements that might foster such an ability to respond together and propose ways for building resilient collaborative practices: (1) stimulating the emergence of situated knowledge to be shared and used, (2) creating legitimacy within the ecosystem through an embodied exploration of the systemic perspective, and (3) cultivating trans-disciplinary interconnectedness of actors through aesthetics.