New funding announced today will see our 3S Research Group become a core part of the new five-year phase of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). As part of this significant investment 3S will establish and house the first ever national observatory for societal engagement with energy and net zero transitions, which is a new core…
A blog post by 3S PhD student Sara Skarp reflecting on her trips to several academic conferences this summer. “Climate change is a lost battle”, human ecologist Alf Hornborg said. The people in the audience at the Degrowth conference seemed shocked, but I suspect that he was echoing secret fears. Is this what we are…
A growing body of scholarship suggests that capitalism is not inevitable and that moments of crisis provide an opportunity for critique and social transformation towards sustainability. Yet literature on social movements employing direct-action tactics to unmake capitalism and challenge austerity in the wake of the ongoing economic crisis is still lacking. It has neither adequately…
Large concentrations of jellyfish are increasingly being recorded worldwide. The main drivers of this are hypothesised to be as a result of increasing ocean temperatures and increases in prey availability. These factors are often influenced by anthropogenic activities that alter the characteristics of the oceans in favour of gelatinous zooplankton. The impacts of a bloomed…
Many communities along the Norfolk coast have historically, and more recently, seen changes to their landscapes. Significant changes are likely in the future, especially in areas where coastal erosion is evident. The way these changes are communicated and the level of community engagement in the decision making process on how to deal with current and…
Social practice theory is a relatively young field of scholarship in social science and has a lot to offer in terms of describing the actions of individuals and communities – particularly with regards to mundane situations or everyday live. To date there has not been a lot of work done on the governance of practices…
This paper presents and tests a new conceptual framework for understanding sustainable transitions in sociotechnical systems. We apply this in the first ever study of sustainable transitions in the UK retail banking system which has suffered recently from banking crises, and links to environmentally-sensitive industries such as fossil fuels. Sustainability-focused values-based banks are a potential…
The need to rapidly decarbonise the energy systems which underpin modern societies is widely accepted, yet there is also growing criticism of ‘top down’, technocentric transition visions. Transitions are, such critics claim, unpredictable, contested, and comprise of multiple and competing perspectives. This paper opens up to diverse visions of UK energy transitions by studying a…
In a new open access paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning Jason Chilvers and Noel Longhurst set out a new framework that reconceives public and civil society engagement in energy transitions as co-produced, relational and emergent. The paper speaks to the urgent challenge of transitioning to sustainable low carbon energy systems and debates…
In this paper we develop an approach to sociotechnical change that is grounded in relational and co-productionist theories from science and technology studies (STS) and wider social theory. This is a constructive project to further develop and advance understandings and explanations of actor dynamics and sociotechnical change. In doing so we propose a new relational…
A newly-published research briefing discusses how we can unleash the transformative power of grassroots innovations, looking in particular at community currencies. Unleashing Grassroots Innovations: A Quest For Community Currency Growth How can grassroots innovations grow, achieve their potential, and increase their influence? Gill Seyfang presents findings of a 3-year quest to learn about diffusing community currencies.…
The quest for sustainability’s holy grail will be the subject of a keynote presentation by Gill Seyfang (3S, UEA) at the European Society for Ecological Economics 2015 conference. Her challenge is to find the key to unleashing the transformative potential of grassroots innovations, such as sustainable money, food, energy, housing, transport and food systems, whose…
‘What’s the meaning of smart? A study of smart grids’ is a report from a multidisciplinary study conducted by Nigel Hargreaves, Jason Chilvers and Tom Hargreaves. The report contends that to be smart, electricity grids have to not only be consistent with current infrastructures and other technologies in a technical sense, but also encourage engagement and adoption by end-users. A…
UKERC (2014-19) Seeks to develop an understanding of diverse forms of participation around the UK energy system
EPSRC (2012-16) Developing, appraising and realising pathways towards a UK low carbon electricity system by 2050.
EC (2014-17) Develops a theory of transformative social innovation which is about empowerment and change in society.
EPSRC (2014-15) How stakeholder perspectives compare and contrast around the meaning of smart with particular attention paid to the emerging opportunities for energy end users and producers.
The field of sustainability transitions research has a strong theoretical emphasis on the sites and modes of intervention in socio‐technical systems, with the intention of informing the purposive ‘steering’ of the system. For critics, questions of power and politics are often obscured in what, it is argued, are optimistic and technocratic transition mechanisms. In addition,…
Seyfang, Gill, and Noel Longhurst. Understanding the diffusion of grassroots innovations for sustainability: An international study of community currency niches. Norwich, UK: Science, Society and Sustainability Research Group, 2014-25
Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Drawing on a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this…
Reducing energy consumption from lighting is, in policy making, largely treated as a matter ofoptimizing the individual lighting product. However, this paper argues that since lighting is a highly cultural, historical and socio-material phenomenon, energy efficient (or intensive) lighting patterns evolve from something more and something else than what the individual lighting product provides. This is an…
System-changing innovations for sustainability transitions are proposed to emerge in radical innovative niches. ‘Strategic Niche Management’ theory predicts that niche-level actors and networks will aggregate learning from local projects, distilling and disseminating best practice. This should lower the bar for new projects to form and establish, thereby encouraging the innovation to diffuse through replication. Within…
Multiple sustainability challenges are increasingly seen as demanding a fundamental transition in the energy system. In this context, community energy projects attract interest as sources for radical innovations. Studies of such bottom-up, civil society-led ‘grassroots innovations’, however, frequently highlight the profound challenges they face in growing, diffusing or even simply surviving. Strategic niche management SNM)…
Community energy has been proposed as a new policy tool to help achieve the transition to a low- carbon energy system, but the evidence base for this strategy is partial and fragmented. We therefore present new empirical evidence from the first independent UK-wide survey of community energy projects. Our survey investigates the objectives, origins and…
Over the last decade, the nascent field of Sustainability Transitions has sought to explain the conditions under which technological innovations can diffuse and disrupt existing socio-technical systems through the successful scaling up of experimental ‘niches’. Building on this pioneering work, recent research on ‘grassroots innovations’ argues that civil society is a promising but under- researched…
Immoderate institutional focus on CO2 emissions tends to obscure the energy-density challenge implied by the low-carbon economy transition. Such an attention deficit is often apparent in the sustainability transitions literature in general and in the multi-level perspective (MLP) in particular. The latter characterises the comparatively “benign” conditions of industrial societies which, riding the upside of…
This paper engages with the progressive politics of climate change and resource constraint developed in the UK and elsewhere by the Transition initiatives ‘movement’ which looks to develop a positive local politics of the transition to a low carbon economy and society. The paper argues firstly that Transitions strengths are in raising issues and developing…
As a response to the unsustainability of current global financial systems, parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informed by ecological economics perspectives on development, value, economic scale and growth. These parallel systems of exchange (or grassroots complementary currencies) are designed to promote sustainable development, by localising…
ESRC (2011-13) Seminars that explore sustainability transitions (projected processes of social change to sustainable patterns of production and consumption) from explicitly social, political and economic perspectives.
EPSRC and ECLEER (2010-13) Studies the diffusion of community energy projects (grassroots innovations) in the UK. It explores the extent of networking between projects, and whether this is assisting in the innovation of community energy.
Leverhulme Trust (2010-13) Aims to understand the factors that support or hinder the diffusion of complementary currencies systems and how they might contribute to wider processes of systemic change for sustainability.
Carbon Connections (dates?) What actually happens when householders are provided with real time feedback on their domestic energy use?
E.On and EPSRC (2008-12) Aims to develop and analyse a set of potential transition pathways for the UK energy system to a low carbon future, and undertake integrated assessments of their feasibility and acceptability.
EPSRC (2012-15) How could smart home technologies (sensing and monitoring networks combined with advanced control devices) provide tailored retrofit decision-support to UK householders?
This report comes from a Transition Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy workshop which took place 21-22 March 2012. The workshop aimed to develop a more comprehensive system-wide exploration of the diverse forms and sites of participation in low carbon energy transitions, and to build on this broader conception of participation to explore actor dynamics, inclusion…
University of Sussex, May 2012 Drew together thirty-six experts in grassroots innovations to discuss their work studying community-based solutions for sustainable development across a range of sectors including food, energy, housing, finance, governance and consumption.
UEA London, March 2012. A panel discussion provided a timely opportunity to take a step back and reflect on recent developments within UK community energy and on their longer-term implications.
Norwich, March 2012. Draws on insights from a range of social science perspectives to undertake a system wide exploration of the range, modes and sites of participation in low carbon transitions.
3S (Science, Society and Sustainability) Research Group 