September 2026 blog post: "LIGHT" taking the next step towards locally defined habitability

After several months of development and discussion with potential partners, we have submitted LIGHT - Local terminal risks, Inhabitable futures and Governance of sustained Habitability Transitions - to the ERC Proof of Concept programme.

LIGHT grows directly out of the questions and material developed through PREFER, but takes them in a somewhat different direction. PREFER has explored how people living through situations they experience as potentially terminal understand what is at stake, what matters to them, and what they consider worth preserving. LIGHT asks what might happen if these insights were put to work: could we develop ways of supporting habitability transitions that start from the knowledge and values of the people concerned, rather than from an external definition of what makes a place habitable or uninhabitable?

This matters because habitability is too often treated as an essentially environmental question. A place becomes “uninhabitable” because of heat, flooding, drought, pollution or other forms of environmental disruption. These are obviously important. But people can also experience a place as becoming uninhabitable because of social, political or economic transformations - or because ways of living, relationships, attachments and meanings that make life worth living are being disrupted.

LIGHT therefore starts from a simple shift: rather than asking first whether a place is habitable, ask how those who live there understand what makes it so.

The project would develop and test a practical approach for doing this, combining narrative enquiry, action research and co-production with local partners. The ambition is not to produce another universal definition of habitability, but to explore whether locally grounded understandings can become useful in decision-making and in the governance of transitions.

This has been a genuinely collaborative development process. Since June, we have been discussing the idea, its possible applications and its practical feasibility with a number of potential partners working in very different contexts. These conversations have been important in shaping the proposal and, more importantly, in testing whether LIGHT could become something useful beyond the academic world.

LIGHT is therefore not yet a project. We have submitted the proposal, and the work described above will begin if the project is funded. For now, what exists is an idea that has been developed, challenged and refined through several months of conversations with prospective partners. Now comes the external look and evaluation: peer review, for funding and for publication. This is what makes academia - and academics - grow!