Paper short abstract:

Wales' One Planet Development policy enables green lifestyle migration. The extant population's ways of life and land use are criticised by a dominant environmental ideology that makes resistance difficult. This interplay of policy, morality and settlement invites parallels with settler colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Transition is often presented as a grass-roots movement that empowers "local communities" to organise and participate. Transition discourse operates at the nexus of global-local interaction to bring local knowledge into conversation with global environmental systems, and vice versa. Accepting the sometimes contentious and exclusionary nature of the term community, this paper takes a further step towards critiquing the transition movement, with a particular focus on green lifestyle migration.

This paper focuses on the example of "One Planet Development" (OPD)—a rural development model which encourages Green lifestyle migration by relaxing planning restrictions for demonstrably zero-carbon smallholdings—to examine the problematic meeting of "migration" and "transition". The OPD rural development model is a "Good Thing", but one which contains a number of problematic contradictions.

Foremost of these is the coupling of migration to the desire for change. Members of the extant rural population resist the transition discourse and the notion that their ways of life are wrong and must change to fit migrant aspirations. The substance of this resistance needs urgent attention. The dominance of the environmentalist ideology, and its inherent perceived morality, creates problems for those who would resist it. Coupled to this migration trend is the creation of specific policy frameworks to support transition. When viewed as the desire for a low-carbon future, such a policy seems outwardly benign. Using ethnographic comparison, this paper argues however that this practice has more in common with settler colonialism than many of its advocates would care to admit.