How to support communities in the long-term sustainability transition: The tailored empowerment program

ABSTRACT Communities around the globe face numerous challenges. The complexity and interwoven nature of such challenges highlight the need for multiple locally tailored sustainable solutions. While at a global level various policies, strategies, and mechanisms have been designed, they often are not adapted to local specifics. Frequently established in a top-down manner, they can create barriers to implementation (e.g. insufficient understanding and ownership, mismatch of vision between local communities and decision-makers). To address this issue, the Tailored Empowerment Program (TEP) was developed to (1) support and empower communities in realizing their long-term vision for a sustainability transition and (2) to rethink the role of science in assisting communities by facilitating access to the best available scientific and policy knowledge. Through raising awareness, fostering participation, and building capacity to co-create contextualized sustainable solutions, TEP enables communities to become agents of change. The paper introduces the TEP concept as a sustainability transition pathway, integrating nature's potential, scientific evidence, and local knowledge through co-creation. It outlines the TEP's added value, provides an approach to its application, and discusses practical aspects of TEP operationalization, monitoring, and evaluation of TEP's impact from sustainability and empowerment perspectives while addressing its limitations and potential for the future.