Energy and communities in transition

A new working paper on civil society and sustainability transitions has been published - you can download this working paper in PDF format (175.12K).

Energy and communities in transition – towards a new research agenda on agency and civil society in sustainability transitions

by Gill Seyfang, Alex Haxeltine, Tom Hargreaves and Noel Longhurst The UK’s energy transition (to a sustainable, low-carbon development path) may turn out to be highly dependant on the engendering and embedding of new types of social practice as well as on the widespread uptake of new low-carbon technologies. We argue that social change and social movements may be of vital importance in the energy transition, because the energy transition implies significant systems change and systems level innovations and not just individual-level behaviour change. Therefore market segmentation models that focus on behaviour change at the individual-level are missing the systemic implications of an energy transition. Behaviour change will likely occur in the context of changing values, lifestyles, and cultural norms modulated through social contexts, including social movements. This paper conceptualizes and theorizes the likely dynamics of social change and social movements in the context of an energy transition, explores a new empirical case study of the UK’s transition movement and sets out elements of a research agenda designed to further explore these links. It does this by firstly presenting a case study, with new empirical evidence, of a civil society movement engaging in energy transitions, namely the Transition Towns movement. The Transition Towns movement provides an example of an emergent civil society movement with an agenda of instigating grassroots change directly rather than attempting to lobby or influence existing policy processes. The movement also presents its own formulations of what the end-point of an energy transition might be, emphasizing, for example, a localization of systems of production and consumption. Insights from the case study are then used to demonstrate how the current body of theory on ‘sustainability transitions’ can be extended to better include and address grassroots innovations, using insights from theories of social movements, and social practice theory. By extending current theory we conceptualize how social innovations link to macro-level systems change on the one hand and individual-level behaviour changes on the other hand. From this analysis we identify elements of an interdisciplinary research agenda for the empirical investigation of impacts of civil society movements for transition.

Energy efficiency and behaviour change workshop

Last week I attended a policy workshop on behaviour and energy efficiency hosted by the Centre for Science and Policy (University of Cambridge - http://csap.org.uk/) and the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

The event was attended by small number of DECC employees and a range of social science academics who were brought together to discuss ways to improve policy making on energy efficiency and consumption behaviour. Prior to the workshop attendees were asked to provide short responses to two questions focussing on a) how energy efficiency behaviours might be improved among the public and b) how communities might be involved in this process. Participants responses to these questions were extremely varied but could, arguably, be grouped around two core themes: first, those that adopted ideas from psychology and behavioural economics on how to encourage individuals to make different energy consumption choices, and second, those that sought to explore energy consumption and efficiency as but part of larger social practices that are collectively negotiated within pre-existing infrastructures of provision.

The discussion at the workshop centred around the different theoretical models being used by social scientists to understand behaviour, with a great deal of attention (more than is normally the case at such workshops) given to ideas about social practices and how policy makers might influence these. The general consensus at the workshop appeared to be that all approaches might have something to offer at different times, in different places, with different groups. Accordingly, key recommendations were that DECC should experiment with multiple theoretical approaches at the same time, seeking to preserve diversity in its interventions rather than becoming locked-in to a single narrow understanding of behaviour. Importantly, the DECC participants appeared to recognise that this requires adopting different conceptualisations of what ‘behaviour’ or ‘practice’ is from those they have adopted up to now. Further, that with this recognition, understandings of what role policy makers can play, what might count as ‘evidence’ and how we might understand ‘society’ are also subject to variation depending on the theoretical approach adopted.

It was a very interesting workshop and very refreshing to hear policy makers grappling with alternative social science approaches. It did, however, remain quite abstract and theoretical in focus. Having said that, I've already received an invitation to a second workshop that will seek to concretise the insights of different theoretical approaches around specific policy issues. I'm hoping this will provide an excellent opportunity for the project team to further contribute to important policy debates about community energy.

Tom Hargreaves

More grassroots innovations in latin America

There's an interview with Adrian Smith, a researcher on the Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy GI project, about "social technologies and niches for sustainable transformation" in the September edition of Saber Cómo (the monthly newsletter of the Argentinean National Institute for Industrial Technology). There are also contributions from Renato Dagnino from Unicamp and Hernan Thomas from Quilmes University.

Social technologies are processes of technology development that seek to be inclusive towards the poor and marginalised, as well as environmentally sustainable. There are affinities with grassroots innovations, but obviously in very different circumstances and with different purposes.

We have been in regular exchange with a research project investigating the innovation and diffusion of social technologies led by Hernan Thomas and Mariano Fressoli. Mariano will be returning to SPRU on an ESRC-SSRC Visiting Fellowship next month (see also this blog for Monday 21 June 2010).

For the full article (in Spanish), click on this link.