3S Members Tom Hargreaves and Jason Chilvers have published a new working paper, with colleagues. The paper explores the challenges of attempting to ‘model’ social practices, drawing on techniques from practice network analysis to map the links between both elements and practices. In doing so, the authors explore how participants ‘mapping’ their commuting practices and…
3S members Tom Hargreaves and Noel Longhurst have published a new working paper based on their research into fuel poverty and emotions. The paper argues that dominant policy understandings of fuel poverty tend to overlook its lived experience, resulting in narrow, overly technical problem framings and solutions. The authors explore a range of emotional engagements with…
3S member Martin Mahony, who is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Human Geography, has published a new working paper based on his work on the history of atmospheric science and technology. It looks at the historical geographies of British imperial air-shipping, and examines what happens when imaginations of technological futures collide with…
Role playing is increasingly used in European Studies and political science more generally to foster students understanding of social science theories. Yet in most cases, role playing is only done by students. Not so in Theoretical Theatre, a teaching innovation which puts the onus on teachers to act. In our performances, teachers embody competing theories…
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 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…
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
Abduction is a very promising mode of inference, particularly when researchers aim to simultaneously build and test theoretical propositions. Yet the application of abduction in social science research is marginal in comparison with induction and deduction. It is likely that this is due so to limited understanding of what abduction does and how it works…
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…
Building monitoring can enhance our understanding of everyday life, yet has sparsely been used in social practices research. Monitoring usually provides context (e.g. differences in performing practices) for more prominent qualitative inquiry, and is rarely centrally integrated methodologically. This paper aims to investigate the potential usefulness of utilising, and integrating more centrally, building monitoring to…
Academics and policy-makers have claimed that community has a potentially useful role to play in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour change. Yet despite a growing literature on the role of community in doing so, a critical examination of the policy context in which it is being employed towards that goal is currently lacking. This paper addresses that…
Fifty years ago, Michael Polanyi wrote his classic essay in defence of the autonomy of scientific enquiry: The Republic of Science: its political and economic theory. Contrasting with this vision, the past 30 years have seen the proliferation of Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) which are explicitly associated with societal goals. The most recent example is…
In the turn to a more critical and reflexive mode of research on public participation with science- related issues limited attention has been given to ‘public participation expertise’, the rise of mediators as a new category of expert, and the ‘technologies of participation’ that they assemble. Drawing on an in-depth study involving mediators of public…
Ambitious government targets set an agenda to reduce domestic energy demand, however the leverage of policies in this domain is poorly understood. Considering a social housing development recently constructed in the east of England, designed to be operationally carbon neutral, this research focuses upon the role of low-carbon technologies in delivering a reduction in residential…
There are two propositions about knowledge society and policy-making which – if true – are troubling in the context of climate change. First policy-making seems ever more reliant on knowledge and yet science seems to deliver knowledge (at least in this context) with ever less certainty or authority. And second and here I quote Dan…
Current models of the role of energy feedback in helping to reduce energy use, assume it fills an information deficit in individual energy consumers’ knowledge and thus encourages them, rationally, to reduce their consumption levels either to save money or the environment. Based on 15 semi? structured interviews with participants trialling a range of smart…
Resource demand management initiatives are designed based upon implicit understandings of power and knowledge distribution between formal institutions and resource users. Employing an interpretive account of cultural theory, resource governance modes are developed in order to explore the differing assumptions held by, and means of action employed by, a set of three consecutive domestic resource…
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…
This paper uses social practice theory to explore the implications of new low carbon dwellings upon energy consuming practices. The handover period for a small to medium sized UK Passivhaus development was investigated, predominantly using interviews as well as informal observation and participation at key events (e.g. move-in day technology tours, information sessions, post-move-in landlord…
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…
This paper contributes to a more reflexive mode of research on public engagement with science- related issues through studying actors that mediate science-society interactions, their roles and relationships, and the nature and extent of learning and reflexivity, in participatory governance networks. A mapping framework is developed to describe the roles and relations of actors mediating…
Sustainable consumption demands that greater attention is paid to the causes and consequences of a materialistic consumer society, in particular the issue of ever-increasing post-consumer waste. Current research suggests that secondhand disposition and acquisition are motivated by generosity, economic necessity and personal fulfilment. Despite the recent growth of online secondhand spaces, including Freecycle (an online…
Changing visions of science and the characterization of scientific expertise have been co-produced with imaginations of ‘the public’ and its proper role in science policy-making. Since the middle of the twentieth century, visions of science as the product of an isolated community devoted to free intellectual inquiry have largely been replaced by the recognition both…
This paper seeks to demonstrate the utility of using two different approaches to sustainability system innovation in parallel, arguing that doing so provides valuable insights that would be lost if only one theoretical lens is used. The Multi-Level Perspective and Social Practice Theory have emerged as competing approaches for understanding the complexity of socio-technical change.…
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…
This paper examines attempts to reduce household energy consumption through the introduction of real time display monitors (RTDs) that enable householders to ‘see’ their energy use (and its associated carbon emissions) and thus take steps to reduce it. Drawing on repeat semi-structured interviews, conducted 12-months apart, with 10 householders participating in a ‘Visible Energy Trial’…
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