The project
Municipalities face many of the major challenges of the circular transition from different realities, but with many shared questions.
How should a municipality prepare to manage a new waste fraction? How do you monitor a high-efficiency collection system once it’s rolled out? How does this model affect street cleaning? How can local businesses be supported toward circularity? What resources are needed? What experiences are already working?
The Xarxa de Ciutats i Pobles cap a la Sostenibilitat offers a privileged framework so these questions don’t have to be answered in isolation. Spora facilitates the Circular Economy and Waste Prevention and Management working groups, turning them into spaces for training, exchange and shared work among local administrations.
Our work starts by identifying the challenges that concern municipalities and building learning pathways around them that combine specialized knowledge, real experiences and participatory dynamics geared toward application.
This isn’t just about organizing sessions. It’s about building knowledge among municipalities and helping turn it into the capacity to act.
When challenges are shared, knowledge can be too.
The challenge
A network of municipalities accumulates an enormous amount of knowledge: experiences that have worked, rollout difficulties, technical decisions, mistakes, solutions and learnings.
The challenge is getting this knowledge to circulate, be tested and prove useful to other municipalities.
That’s why the working groups aren’t designed as a series of standalone sessions. Each program starts from the needs identified and builds a throughline that allows progressively deeper work on a challenge.
This means moving from the regulatory framework to real experience; from experience to debate; from debate to collective work; and from collective work to a tool, a criterion or a roadmap that each administration can adapt to its own reality.
Moving from sharing information to building solutions.
The approach
Spora designs the programs around one question: what does a municipality need to know and work on today to act better tomorrow?
From there, we identify priority topics, build the learning pathways, select specialists and municipal experiences, and design formats that allow progress from knowledge toward application.
Content is therefore not scheduled to be interesting: it’s built to be useful.
Methodology
From the shared question to your own tool.
Each cycle is designed as a small collective learning process, combining online and in-person formats and adapting the methodology to what needs to be achieved. Sessions include:
- Expert framing, to establish a shared base on regulations, models, tools, technical constraints or new trends.
- Municipal experiences, so other administrations can explain not just what they did, but how they did it, what difficulties they ran into and what they learned.
- Complementary voices, bringing in universities, companies, organizations, the third sector and other actors when the challenge calls for a broader view.
- Peer debate, creating spaces where municipal technical teams can test doubts against each other and share real problems.
- Participatory dynamics, which allow work on the municipalities’ own reality and turn a session’s content into decisions, criteria or proposals.
- Applicable tools and outcomes, steering the pathways toward concrete outputs: diagnostics, SWOT analyses, indicators, timelines, work plans or roadmaps.
- Continuity between sessions, so each meeting builds on the last and allows progress step by step from understanding the challenge to defining responses.
The value for municipalities
Not leaving a session with just more information, but with more capacity to act.
Facilitating the groups lets each municipality access specialized knowledge without having to build it from scratch, learn about comparable experiences, test its decisions against other technical teams, and have a safe space to also share difficulties and uncertainties.
But the differentiating value is the chance to work on your own reality. The network thus becomes a shared knowledge infrastructure.
Learnings
Sharing knowledge is also a way to accelerate transformation.
When different municipalities face similar challenges, working as a network means they don’t have to start from scratch every time.
One experience can spare another administration from making the same mistakes. One question can reveal a shared problem. A methodology developed in one municipality can become the starting point for another. And a space for debate can help turn an idea that is still taking shape into a viable project.
Facilitating the working groups has confirmed to us that training is most transformative when it stops being a one-way transfer of knowledge and becomes a shared process of building solutions.
After all, the value lies in making it possible for the knowledge of one territory to help all the others move forward.