The ET-Bioenergy Plan introduces non-linear models for the Circular Economy to a vast audience, with a bottom-up approach to technology innovation and social change in local contexts. It turns the problems of scarce resources, environmental pollution and cost of waste into profitable activities for larger layers of population and business players. This results are achieved by tackling the challenge of development at its roots.
In the Majella prototype, a participated process of systems innovation drive the energy networks exploiting the local potential of natural resources, including waste and residuals, and transforms system costs into shared profits, energy security and radical environmental improvements. Last generation biofuels and eco-energy closing circles of distributed cogeneration, boost a depressed post-industrial economy and profit from the green economy in different sectors. The aggregation of heterogeneous local strengths in clusters with shared objectives, triggers fresh innovation for sustainable development. This experiment demonstrates how hard and soft systems analysis, active participation and closing circles design of innovative systems and processes in a bottom-up approach, can advance networked sustainable systems as an effective option against energy and environment risk.
Tavolo Majella attracts investments by boosting applied research, systems development, change of habits and mentality while re-engineering processes toward eco-energy closing circles (closed loop). They are non linear processes oriented to re-use, repair and recycle all local resources. Among the wide set of available technologies, Tavolo Majella promotes with particular emphasis the energy innovation from high density energy vectors (mostly gaseous as biogas, syngas and hydrogen) from waste and non-food biomass, since their production life cycle mostly turns environmental, urban and industry costs into local income with a low-disturbing and closing circles approach.
The actors of Patto Sviluppo Majella, the Covenant guided by Tavolo Majella (see below), work together in a network organisation promoting the innovation and sharing the benefits. A Strategic Agency coordinates Territorial Units where the local players are teamed up on a functional basis to perform tasks and share vertical and horizontal competencies. Links among the TU are loose and based on human, technical and economic/exchange relations.
The network building phase took around a year, which was necessary to stimulate interest and gather consensus among the closing circles development goals, promote the initiatives, debate the ideas, design the organisation and write the Programme. A structured process of soft and hard systems analysis, design and development depicted the current situation of energy, agriculture and industry systems, providing the logical and physical framework for participated decision making by relevant stakeholders.
Community players such as Municipalities, unions, industry associations, research institutions and universities signed the Covenant or Patto Sviluppo Majella (PSM) in 2005 and participate to its governing association, Tavolo Majella (TM) with the mission of supporting the change required by sustainable development and by the shift to a ‘circular economy’.
The ET-Bioenergy Plan© starts in 2006 as a part of the ET Programme© (Energy from the Territory) and is selected in the 2005-2008 Campaign for Sustainable Energy Europe. It is the first prototype of innovation and change management for development built by consensus with a closing circles approach to the eco-energy potential of natural resources.
TM Partners collaborate for systems innovation from global vision to local action, and the ANANAC© methodology has provided the strategy and operation tools to mobilise local actors and mobilise them toward the sustainable development of the area. The approach allowed the actors to experiment the ‘appropriation’ of the ideas generated at the round-tables, as the necessary link between anticipation and action. “Appropriation allows action to become efficient and successful” (Godet, M., Bassaler, N., Monti, R., Richou, S., 2004), and represent the first move of an effective change management process.
The principles of bioeconomy and closed-loop business and behavioural models, guide the elaboration of the strategy and orient this experiment to close the circles toward efficient use of natural resources and effective re-engineering of human activity systems in industry, agriculture and municipalities.
You can download the following presentations (in Italian) about Tavolo Majella and Patto Sviluppo Majella.
First introduction at Forum PA, Roma 2005
ET-Bioen_AIGE_2008 at II AIGE Congress, Pisa 2008
Majella Bio-Energy Cluster at IEE Biogas Region, Teramo 2010
Please, contact us for further information.
