Under the motto „SMART CSOs“ the final conference of the Action Town project took successfully place in London on 14 and 15 March 2011. About 100 participants came together to not only hear about the results of the four exploratory actions conducted by Action Towns’ National Focal Points but also to discuss ways forward to foster more effective CSO strategies in the future.

Being in the process of finalising their small scale pilot project on SCP in their respective countries, the National Focal Points ECODES (Spain), TTGV (Turkey), Green Liberty (Latvia) and MAMA-86 (Ukraine) shared their initial project results. Key lessons learnt and potential follow-ups have been discussed. For more information watch this space.

In addition, conference participants looked at why CSOs should – and how they can – work towards a more holistic and systemic transition to a sustainable society instead of pursuing the narrow technical policy focus of many of today’s strategies (as the Action Town Survey Report has shown most CSOs still do). As already the outcomes of the Action Town Roadmap Workshop have shown, researchers and CSOs alike are here needed; both have also equally shown a high interest in discussing this topic. Conference participants decided to took current thinking to the next level and to develop practical ways forward. These promising discussions – enabled and kicked-off by the Action Town project – will be continued by a group of enthusiastic and engaged individuals. This is a huge success for Action Town in sustaining its activities on supporting the collaboration of CSOs and researchers.

For more information on the follow-up activities please see also www.smart-csos.org.

To download the program of the SMART CSO conference, click here.