The Idea

Islands of hope aims at supporting the people of Samothraki to collectively express their challenges and desires and to develop a proposal for a promising and sustainable future for their island. It also intends to contribute to the transfer of this vision to the higher institutional levels, and seeks to be an inspiration for other small islands.

Point of departure

Small islands are renowned sources of natural richness and cultural diversity. Yet their fate is often decided in urban political centres that do not take into account their unique characteristics. So, while insular societies and their environment are directly influenced by decisions made at higher administrative levels, the local community is largely excluded from regional planning deliberations. This often leads to major conflicts within the community, while the institutional barriers for citizens to influence regional policies leads to feelings of resignation.

Structure of the program

“Islands of Hope” aims at supporting a process of participatory planning on Samothraki that makes space for the needs of the inhabitants to be expressed, and that takes into account the challenges and opportunities of the insular environment. The program has three main pillars:

Co-designing priorities

The first goal is the active involvement of citizens and local stakeholders in co-designing a vision and future priorities for the island, that find resonance within the community and through time. This is a process that involves empowering voices that are often overlooked, providing the space for them to be expressed and communicated within the community, but also merging potential convergences and mediate divergences.

Mapping institutional pathways

A second goal is to clearly charter the challenges and opportunities associated with the implementation of the desired vision. What are the obstacles and what institutional pathways can be found for a locally generated collective vision of local development to be clearly communicated to regional authorities and become, at least partly, realized?

Summary of findings

Finally, we aim to summarize and record the key findings from our experience, in an easily accessible way, in the form of an insular deliberation toolkit that can help and provide inspiration for other small islands, and peripheral areas that face similar challenges.

.

The project “Islands of Hope” is part of the program Civic Europe, which is an incubator for locally rooted civic initiatives, organizations and individuals in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe realized by MitOst and Sofia Platform, funded by Stiftung Mercator