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…
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…
Members of the 3S group have organised panel sessions at three different European conferences over the summer of 2016 on the topic of relational and systemic approaches to public participation in science, innovation and sustainability transitions. These panels all draw on conceptual, methodological and empirical innovations in the 3S group from the recent Remaking Participation book and…
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…
See the call for papers below for a session at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers’ Annual Conference in August 2016, organised by 3S members Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett. Relational geographies of participation Organised by Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett (3S Research Group, University of East Anglia, UK) For geographers…
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…
A new 3S Working Paper by Jason Chilvers and Noel Longhurst develops a novel approach to understanding and intervening in sociotechnical system transitions, in domains such as energy and sustainability. The approach builds a relational and co-productionist understanding of system change – grounded theories from science and technology studies (STS) and wider social theory –…
On July 14th 2015 Jason Chilvers, Helen Pallett and Tom Hargreaves published a scoping note entitled ‘Rethinking energy participation as relational and systemic’. As part of a the Systemic participation and decision-making in UK energy transitions UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) project the note develops new perspectives on energy participation and societal engagement with energy systems. It creates…
‘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
The final report from the ‘Making Energy Publics’ workshop hosted by the 3S group last year is released today. The workshop brought together leading voices from Science and Technology Studies, Human Geography and Sociology to discuss the future of academic research into and engagement with the making of energy publics. The central argument of the…
EPSRC (2012-16) Developing, appraising and realising pathways towards a UK low carbon electricity system by 2050.
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…
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…
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…
Thursday 26 October 2010, SPRU, University of Sussex The fourth workshop in the ESRC seminar series Critical Perspectives on Public Engagement in Science and Environmental Risk explored both formal and informal forms of public engagement and participation in the context of energy systems and transitions to sustainability. The energy system and the need to build more…
Community energy is growing and making a difference. All around the country, more and more people are getting involved in projects that develop sustainable energy in their communities, and researchers in 3S(Science, Society and Sustainability Research Group) in ENV have been studying the potential and development of this emerging sector. Through awareness-raising discussion groups, renewable energy co-operatives, and…
3S (Science, Society and Sustainability) Research Group 