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292 ANDRÁS TAKÁCS-SÁNTA The Microcommunity Program The germ of the above ideas about the importance of rediscovering communities dates from the beginning of 2008 and they were so animating that I immediately organized a team to launch a social change of this kind already in that very year. We named our initiative the Microcommunity Program.’ Our major objective was to help the establishment and running of as many ecological local communities all over the Carpathian Basin as possible — in all settlement sizes from microvillages to large cities. We defined our activity as a research and activist program, indicating that while we were conducting research in the traditional sense, we were also intent on promoting social transformation. Despite the ambitious goals, the Microcommunity Program was fairly introverted in its first nine years, exposing very little of its activity to the external world. The aim was to create firm theoretical bases for the program and to collect broad field knowledge, and we felt we had much to learn in order to consolidate the foundations. The introverted period could not have been much shorter, for the program — with a few sporadic short periods — worked with volunteers (and this is more or less the situation today as well). To build solid foundations, we set out along two main tracks. On the one hand, we started fieldwork, mapping the country for about three years, to get to know as many kinds of ecological local initiatives in Hungary as possible, first of all communal initiatives. In each, we conducted in-depth interviews, primarily with the leaders.* Sometimes the interviews were complemented by observations of the participants. In 2012, we were asked to contribute to the National Council for Sustainable Development's collection of good practices. Eventually, the publication included 14 case studies (Kajner et al. 2013) based on the findings of our nationwide field research. We continue to tour the country, but with less intensity, since we receive word of fewer and fewer initiatives that are new to us, the likes of which we have not yet examined. As of early 2023, we have examined some 75 local ecological initiatives, and visited some of the most intriguing ones two or three times. Our fieldwork was expanded in a new direction from 2012. We launched the first study of this kind in two neighboring Pest County settlements, Nagybérzsony (from 2012) and Késpallag (from 2014). While in the former, no ecological community evolved (though we helped the local people found a short-lived producers’ market), the latter was founded in 2016 and was the first community to emerge due to our inspiration.” The other main track of the first nine years of the Microcommunity Program was writing books and processing the relevant academic literature. We set ourselves a very ambitious goal: to publish a manual and a webpage that contains a critical overview of the situation in the diverse fields of our life in Hungary today and also presents many alternative communal activities. A chapter of the book with > See www. kiskozossegek.hu This fieldwork was supported by the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations in the first two years — up until the massive curtailing of the ombudsman’s licenses and budget. The summary of the first years of the action and research at Nagybörzsöny and Köspallag, see Takäcs-Sänta 2017: chapter 8. 6
