Designing Transitions, Restoring Habitat: Theories of Change from the Ecosystem Restoration Community Movement

The practice of ecological restoration spans a wide range of human interventions in socio-ecological systems. These interventions include activities ranging from plant propagation to river rerouting, and are done with the intention of bringing about desirable futures in response to ecosystem degradation. Through restoration, post-industrial sites have been transformed into thriving oases, and forests decimated by severe fire have been revegetated. This ever-expanding global body of work offers concrete, longstanding examples of people working together to design for transitions and create restored human habitats. In this paper, I frame this widespread movement of multiple epistemic cultures and their restorative projects as examples of designing for transitions. This paper concentrates on one specific subculture within restoration: the international Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement, which is a network of more than fifty restoration communities across thirty different countries working at the grassroots level to restore degraded land.  I analyse the case of the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement using the lens of “theories of change” from the Transition Design framework, bringing the two fields into conversation. Transition Design scholarship argues for greater consideration of the theories of change that drive designing. As such, those who design for transitions need concrete examples of how a theory of change may be translated into a design strategy and designed artifacts as part of a change-making process. To this end, I present four themes of change theories present in the Ecosystem Restoration Communities network. I discuss how they are translated into restoration approaches and subsequently into designed artifacts through individual Ecosystem Restoration Communities. I present this case to strengthen the connection between designing for transitions and restoration, as well as to illustrate how theories of change can guide the work of designing transformative change.