Community organizing, sustainability transitions and public policies: Introduction to the special section

The policy issues discussed in this collection refer, on the one hand, to very practical difficulties community initiatives face, like finding an appropriate legal status, accessing public funding and the consequences thereof, dealing with often incoherent and unsuitable regulations, or having a voice in the governance of some crucial policy areas. On the other hand, investigating how these challenges are managed in practice is useful for highlighting more general tensions between communities' self-organization and wider political regimes, how these tensions are negotiated within more or less favorable policy landscapes and how similar initiatives react, adapt and behave differently. This research, we believe, is crucial to identify the very conditions for sustainability transitions to occur. In this article we provide some introductory reflections on the topic, as well as a summary of the contributions to the special section.