Great Transition Campaign

The Great Transition Campaign works to catalyze a movement for system change, a “global citizens movement” for a future rooted in well-being, solidarity, and ecological resilience. GTC’s three-part program—Vision, Collaboration, Mobilization—fosters conceptual coherence, strategic cooperation, and public engagement across the many disparate efforts to forge a better world. Because GTC alone cannot catalyze a transformative movement, the program is designed to complement and support aligned projects by building trust, solidarity, and unity.

A Global Assembly

The Great Transition Network (GTN) serves as the knowledge community of the Great Transition Campaign. Established in 2003, GTN engages a diverse global group of over a thousand scholars and activists from more than 70 countries. GTN advances the emergence of a global citizens movement through supportive scholarship and activist practice. It aims to elaborate a new social vision, cross-fertilize Great Transition concepts with academic disciplines and political traditions, and grow a global community of aligned scholars and activists.

Background

GTC’s roots can be traced back to the 1980s to the early discourse on the meaning and implications of sustainable development. While the mainstream focused on technical tweaks to conventional development, advocates of a transformational strategy saw a need for deep economic, social, and cultural shifts, a “new sustainability paradigm” to drive and guide development. In 1995, Tellus convened the Global Scenario Group to illuminate the requirements for a transition to sustainability. It summarized its insights in the valedictory 2002 essay Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead.

In 2003, to engage a far larger group in evolving the Great Transition framework, the Global Scenario Group segued into the Great Transition Initiative. For over two decades, GTI served as a forum for elaborating global scenarios, sharpening theories of change, and spreading the word through scholarly essays, quantitative analysis, and public outreach.

In 2025, the fight for a Great Transition embarked on a new phase with the launch of the Great Transition Campaign. GTC inherits from GTI two unique resources—a rich body of scholarly ideas and the thousand-strong international assembly, the Great Transition Network (GTN). Inheriting this legacy provided GTC with a dynamic point of departure for a new phase of work that shifts the focus from ideas to action.

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Recent GTC Publications