1. Beyond the ABC TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
how social science can help climate change policy
TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
climate change and everyday life
TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
climate change and everyday life
Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
ESRC climate change leadership fellowship
Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
ESRC climate change leadership fellowship

2. Reservoir of resources in social theory
Including social theories of consumption, material culture, technology studies, cultural theory, theories of practice, histories of socio-technical change, transitions, innovation studies….
Climate change is probably the greatest long-term challenge
facing the human race (Blair 2006).
New ideas are needed, existing interventions are not enough.

3. the
ABC of sustainable consumption

4. A B C Individuals have attitudes
Attitudes towards consumption, waste and responsibility need changing
Attitudes are changed by persuasion and information.
Attitudes drive behaviour A
Behaviour is what individuals do.
Behaviours need changing.
Behaviours are driven by attitudes and prices.
People choose how to behave B C
If individuals chose to use less energy, water and other resources we’d not be in the fix we are
Policy makers need to encourage individuals to make different choices

5. Behavioural psychology and economics dominate climate change policy
Kick the CO2 habit (United Nations Environment Programme 2008)
Creatures of Habit: the Art of Behavioural Change (Prendergast 2008)
I Will if You Will (Sustainable Consumption Round Table 2006)
Changing behaviour through policy making (DEFRA 2005)
Motivating Sustainable Consumption (Jackson 2005)
Driving public behaviours for sustainable lifestyles (Darnton 2004)
DEFRA, A framework for pro-environmental behaviours (2008)
Behaviour change goals include more responsible water usage

6. Attraction No. 1: emphasise consumer choice
Chosen behaviour
Driving factors
levers
Other Chosen behaviour
Change driving factors
Drivers include
Attitudes
Society
Economics
Other people
Habit
Externalise pretty much anything, including the role of government and policy

7. Assume a ‘green’ orientation to a huge range of different practices
DEFRA, 2008 Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours
The headline behaviour goals
Install insulation -Better energy management -Install microgeneration-Increase recycling -Waste less (food)-More responsible water usage-Use more efficient vehicles -Use car less for short trips -Avoid unnecessary flights (short haul)-Buy energy efficient products-Eat more food that is locally in season -Adopt lower impact diet
Social marketing of green consumption
Avoiding regulation
Assume choice
Focus on efficiency, not demand

8. Attraction No. 2: segments inform targets
High ability and willing
Low potential and unwilling
Segment willingness
and ability
Ability to act
High
Low
1: Positive greens
I think it’s important that I do as much as I can to limit my impact on the environment.
18%
3: Concerned
consumers
I think I do more than a lot of people. Still, going away is important, I’d find that hard to give up..well I wouldn’t, so carbon off-setting would make me feel better.
14%
4: Sideline supporters
I think climate change is a big problem for us. I know I don’t think much about how much water or electricity I use, and I forget to turn things off..I’d like to do a bit more.
5: Cautious participants
I do a couple of things to help the environment. I’d really like to do more, well as long as I saw others were.
14%
2: Waste watchers
‘Waste not, want not’ that’s important, you should live life thinking about what you are doing and using.
12%
7: Honestly
disengaged
Maybe there’ll be an environmental disaster, maybe not. Makes no difference to me, I’m just living life the way I want to.
18%
6: Stalled starters
I don’t know much about climate change. I can’t afford a car so I use public transport.. I’d like a car though.
10%
High
Willing
to Act
Low
Attraction No. 2: segments inform targets 8 8

9. Attraction No. 3: consumers as factors in systems that can be modeled.
Social
Demographic Change
Customer
Demanding
Accepting
Environmental, economic and social drivers of the future; of which the social is defined like this: Mouchel for UKWIR
Demographic Change (fixed)
Customer
The demanding customer will expect to be able to use as much water as they wish and can afford.
Not susceptible to water efficiency messages
Also likely to expect very high standards of service
The accepting customer will be prepared to use water more sparingly for the greater good.
Will accept current standards of service.

10. Attraction No. 4: provides an ‘evidence’ based approach
And a logical explanation for intervention
Attitudes are this
Opportunities are that
Barriers are the following
If obstacles are overcome, behaviours are likely to change
Universality of behaviour
Permits comparisons and lessons from smoking to building design; from eating to driving; from laundering to gardening; from one country to another
Uniformity of levers and drivers - human nature; together with market segments.
Depending on what you count as evidence!

11. Attraction No. 5: the ABC deals with everything
Assume levers, and if they
don’t work, assume barriers.
Assume choice, and if it doesn’t transpire, assume habit.
Assume drivers, - the detail doesn’t matter
Assume that attitudes are drivers, so collect and use evidence on attitudes

12. Attraction No. 6: allocates responsibility
Twelve Steps to Help You Kick the CO2 Habit
“The day's agenda is to give a human face to environmental issues; empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development”
…. Or, “The day’s agenda is to position C02 as an matter of personal addiction, thereby denying the social formation of habit, or any wider politics of consumption, production and demand”

13. Dominant social theory and policy
Individual attitudes, behaviour, choice
price and persuasion
Dynamic regimes of everyday life;
changing definitions of normal practice generate changing patterns of demand for energy, water, and other resources.
Social theories of practice and transition but what link to policy?

14. A practice is social .. it is a ‘type’ of behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds. (Reckwitz 2000: 250)
Practices involve the active integration of materials, images and competence.
Practices are coherent entities that require performance for their existence: performances are generative and transformative.

15. A practice “consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.” (Reckwitz 2002: 249).
Consumption occurs as items are appropriated in the course of engaging in particular practices ( Warde 2005, p131.)

16. For example
running hot water; bathrooms; ideas of body and hygiene, freshness, knowing how to operate shower and get the temperature right.
A bicycle, a road, an ability to balance, and the sense that this is a normal and not a crazy thing to do.
Flour, sugar, eggs and milk, an idea of home baking, competence to combine and cook ingredients

17. The circulation and distribution of elements

18. Links are made and broken between practices

19. Theories of behaviour Theories of practice Individual choice
External drivers
Common base in belief
Causal
Theories of practice
Shared, social
Endogenous dynamics
Specific cultural and material histories
Reproductive, generative

20. Global cooling
“using energy to keep cool in hot ambient temperatures on a large scale is a relatively new development.”
the potential cooling demand in metropolitan Mumbai is about 24% of the demand for the entire United States.
Sivak, M. (2009), Potential energy demand for cooling in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the world : Implications for developing countries, Energy Policy, 37, 1382–1384
“energy demand for air conditioning increases rapidly in the 21st century. The increase is from close to 300 TWh in 2000, to about 4000 TWh in 2050 and more than 10,000 TWh in 2100”
Isaac, M. and van Vuuren, D. (2009), “Modeling global residential sector energy demand for heating and air conditioning in the context of climate change, Energy Policy 37,507–521

21. How did the practice of heating and cooling to around 22 degrees C become normal? what climate to provide?
Arrival of capacity to control .. So what should indoors be like

22. Standardising comfort, sweat and smell: the clo and the olf
The standard amount of insulation required to keep a resting person warm in a windless room at 70 °F (21.1°C) is equal to one Clo.
Units were chosen so that 1 clo would be roughly the insulating value afforded by a man’s underwear and a lightweight suit, or “a heavy top coat alone.”
The Olf is a unit used to measure the scent emission of people and objects.
One olf is defined as the scent emission of an "average person", a sitting adult that takes an average of 0.7 baths per day and whose skin has a total area of 1.8 square metres; the scent emission of an object or person is measured by trained personnel comparing it to normed scents.
Standardising science reproduces a specific set of cultural conventions: this matters for ventilation rates and energy consumption.
Professor Fanger in his "Doctor-dress" at a reception at DTU, June 2001

23. Air conditioning as normal
Contrasting ‘start’ conditions; so if we considered australia, japan and the usa, would we describe
three regime transitions or one? Socio-technical innovation but with standard technology. However if we attend to the rest of the sociotechnical ‘systems; we see different forms and processes of disappearance including some resistance in japan. And somewhat different notions of ‘need’ in australia compared to the USA.
Yet globally, these different patterns all feed a similarly ‘standardising’ outcome – 22 degrees C. Energy intensity.. Etc.
As with other sts transitions, a case that’s mostly about the private sector: govts regulate efficiency sometimes, but not the ‘need’ for ac or possibility to install it.
Can we use this model to understand or anticipate ‘the future’ emergence of new (or should it be old) non-air conditioned ‘niches’? Can govts, now, do anything to stem the tide?
Though tricky to account for in terms of the basically technological hierarchy story, its easier to conceptualise in terms of circulation of elements. (the ears model doesn’t really deal with change: only makes the point that image/meaning and infrastructures/sops both constitute practice).
Leave these puzzles there and go on to others.
(Geels 2002)
Disappearing systems: sweat, clothing, siesta

24. Configuring refrigerated regimes
USA: post war house building, 1950s onwards
Japan: symbol of westernisation, 1980s
Australia: retrofitting existing stock, 2000
Different trajectories in different countries
Diversity between and within countries

25. Air conditioning as normal
Configuration 1. In which maintaining degrees C. indoors is novel
Configuration 2. In which maintaining degrees C. indoors has become normal
Japan
India
Australia
time
Technology already established: enters existing regimes, ready-made

26. Practice oriented Behaviour oriented
How do concepts of comfort come to be as they are?
How are systems of practice sustained?
How might these be reconfigured?
Intervention in the reproduction of everyday practice (18-28 degrees C, rather than 22)
Scale of impact: potentially massive
Behaviour oriented
Why don’t people turn the heating/cooling down at night?
Why don’t they install more efficient technologies?
Why don’t they install more insulation?
Promote efficiency and ‘retain current standards’
Scale of impact: inherently limited

27. Opportunities for practice oriented policy
To stem the adoption and/or use of air conditioning
Why 22 degrees C., where did that idea come from, what assumptions does it carry with it.
Why wear a suit when it is hot outside?

28. Re-making practices and places
This year, the MOE aims to expand the movement from the business scene to everyday lifestyles, using various knowledge and ideas, to stay comfortable in 28 C rooms.
the ministry estimated that the campaign resulted in a 1,720,000-ton reduction in CO2 emission, the equivalent volume of CO2 emitted by about 3.85 million households for one month.
Cool Biz: not wearing suit and tie

29. Re-arranging the relation between body, clothing, climate and building technologies

30. Re-inventing practices?
time
Before air conditioning
Air conditioning
Beyond air conditioning

31. dynamics
infrastructure
practice
There are lots more concepts on offer for policy makers willing to go beyond the ABC
regime
system
transition

32. These ideas also imply that:
Theories of practice suggests that policy shapes what counts as normal practice (and hence sustainability) by:
Contributing to the circulation and distribution of elements
Infrastructures
Ideas and ideologies
Accumulations of competence
Defining valued projects – bundles and complexes of practice
Shaping relations between practice – e.g. competition for time and other resources
These ideas also imply that:
Policy is inside and not outside the system it seeks to change.
Transitions in practice are not processes over which any one set of actors has control.

33. Disadvantages of practice theory for policy
No 1. recognises that policy has a part to play in maintaining unsustainable ways of life
No 2. highlights basic questions about how demand is made
No 3. points to material inequalities and differences
No 4. lessons are not transferable, each practice is different
No 5. acknowledges limits of agency
No 6. creates space for debate about the scale and direction of change

34. How to ignite social knowledge around climate change?
Ideas that don’t fit the ABC model are not useful
How to ignite social knowledge around climate change?
“our understanding .... of the interaction between policy and social practice is as yet so limited that it would be difficult to see how policy could make use of this position – beyond taking social norms a bit more seriously as influences on behaviour”
(Jackson 2005: 55).

35. How social science researchers respond to questions that are not of their own making
Landscape of ideas: challenging
Populated by academics and non-academics alike; currents of debate, force-fields of influence;
change is endogenous; interaction is unavoidable yet structured
Chameleon: fitting in
Coping with external pressures, managing to blend in, to travel and to survive