• Energy Research

Current energy-related practices in bioenergy-dependent households and communities regularly reinforce social inequality and exacerbate environmental challenges. By investigating women's influence on rural energy service provision, this study sheds light on gendered practices and women's agency in a case study of three villages in central Ethiopia. Women's lives in these communities revolve around practices such as collecting wood and using fire for cooking, hygiene, or space heating. Energy-efficient technologies like cookstoves are peddled as solutions to the day-to-day challenges women face. While these can enhance health and well-being, a one-sided focus on technology overlooks the deep-seated social meanings that limit the agency of women. Energy research urgently needs to improve its understanding of how women may alter energy-related social practices, to avoid that technocratic approaches entrench the provision of energy services as a gendered female chore. This interdisciplinary research employs a Stock-Flow-Practice nexus perspective to analyse interlinkages between agency, practices, meanings, and the use of materials. Study results reveal that the agency of women to change their engagement in energy-related practices is curtailed by social prescriptions within the investigated households and communities. However, in households where women can garner higher levels of agency, they are able to shift how their households engage in practices. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding women's agency as unfolding through their engagement in social practices and reflecting negotiated social prescriptions. Policies and programmatic interventions towards sustainable and equitable energy transitions in bioenergy-dependent communities need to incorporate a practice-centred concept of agency to reach their goals.

ENERGISE is the first large-scale European effort to reduce household energy use through a change initiative that adopted a ‘living lab’ approach informed by social practice theory. Two challenges were introduced to 306 households in eight countries: to lower indoor temperatures and to reduce laundry cycles. This contribution demonstrates the usefulness of a practice-centered design that takes habits and routines as an entry point for understanding how different ‘elements of practices’ can be re-crafted. We discuss how a participatory ‘living lab’ approach that explicitly encouraged deliberation and reflexivity served to sharpen attention on practices as central to change. We discuss how ‘doing laundry’ and ‘keeping warm’, as very different types of practices, responded to the change initiative. For laundry, tangible changes in material arrangements, news skills and sensory competencies, and shifts in what is seen as ‘normal’ proved to be central to reducing wash cycles, including wearing clothes more often, airing them out, using smell to gauge cleanliness, or keeping dirty clothes out of sight. Warming people rather than spaces through added layers and activities, and related shifts in norms around thermal comfort, emerged as crucial steps towards lowering indoor temperatures. Average changes in reported temperatures and wash cycles indicate that reductions are possible, without an emphasis on individuals or technologies as central to change. We end with a discussion on the implications of our approach for energy sufficiency thinking and practice, emphasizing the merits of taking the complexity of everyday life seriously when designing change initiatives.

Concepts of “mobility cultures” are gaining traction in mobility research and policy across Europe. This article initially examines and synthesizes existing empirical and conceptual work on mobility cultures. Resulting insights are subsequently used to structure a culturally sensitive inquiry into the transformation of the automobile industry in Southern Germany. For this, a discourse-analytical approach is applied to diverse sources of qualitative data collected specifically for this study. Results reveal different understandings among participants of two regional initiatives intended to facilitate a debate about the future of the automobile industry in the area. These initiatives feature culturally diverse understandings of both the current “car state” and opportunities and threats emanating from a potential shift toward a more environmentally friendly “mobility state.” It is shown that discursive representations of the two states in Southern Germany as major car-manufacturing sites dominate, at the expense of alternative views that advocate for the formation of mobility-related regional identities “beyond the car.” This insistence on maintaining regional identities rooted in car manufacturing simultaneously stokes fears of potential social upheaval in the region if any restrictions to (auto)mobility were to pass, thereby delaying an urgently needed (industrial) political departure from unsustainable car-centric mobility cultures.

Reducing residential energy use and related CO2 emissions across society requires approaches that understand energy demand as dependent on the performance of a range of interconnected social practices, which includes aspects of timing, location and material contexts. However, current energy policy and change initiatives often rely on a somewhat narrow combination of rational consumer choice models, efficiency measures and information-based behavioral change theory, thus falling short on anticipated reductions. Insights from the ENERGISE project highlight the merits of a practice-theoretical approach to social scientific energy research that explicitly recognizes complex interactions in the social organization of everyday life. The paper demonstrates how such an approach provides knowledge on variations in energy use across households, social groups and societies and how these are (not) acknowledged in the problem framings of dominant energy policies and change initiatives. Reflecting on experiences made during a large-scale comparative analysis of sustainable energy consumption change initiatives in 30 European countries, this paper presents a new and innovative methodology for investigating the dynamics of change initiatives that target energy use within households and communities. It concludes with some critical reflections on the methodology presented.

This article demonstrates how a cultural reading of consumption that focuses on the meaning and materiality of domestic indoor microclimates can contribute to conceptual developments in the field of practice theory that refocus attention on cultural patterns, including prevailing norms and prescriptions regarding indoor temperature and thermal comfort. Drawing on evidence collected during a research-led change initiative that encouraged people to reduce energy use in the home by lowering indoor temperature to 18°C, we deploy the heuristic device of “indoor microclimate as artifact” to show how the manifestation of this new artifact initiated significant changes in everyday practices that revolve around heating. We observe that these changes may also spill over into the public sphere – from home to workplace. By making the microclimate a tangible and visible thing, we describe how people appropriate and appreciate this new object of consumption, what it says about different bodies in diverse and bounded spaces, and what the artifact as a commodity reveals about broader systems of heating and energy provision, and associated actors. Due to the increasing spread of central heating and the growing importance of complex technological devices to monitor and control indoor temperature, heating is no longer a practice in and of itself for many urban dwellers in Europe. However, when people appropriate the indoor microclimate, new heating-related practices emerge that can lead to energy sufficiency. We thus argue that by deliberately “materializing” domestic indoor microclimate as part of a change initiative, more sustainable forms of energy use can be made to matter.

The continuous growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector has led to calls for a sustainability transition that is largely driven by technological means and supply-side measures such as infrastructure and vehicles [...]

In this article, we examine a change initiative designed to involve households in testing ways to transform two everyday practices heating and doing laundry. The research design included an examination of the challenges of changing practices either in a setting that fosters collective engagement or with individual households. Two different types of living labs were carried out simultaneously in eight European countries in Autumn Winter 2018. We reflect on differences in results in terms of both changes in practices and the experiences of participating households that we argue can be at least partially attributed to householders engagement in different types of living labs. We discuss the implications of an individual-focused vs. community-oriented approach for change initiatives seeking to challenge social norms for sustainability transitions, concentrating in particular on differences in the nature of participants engagement and their willingness and ability to challenge routine practices. This is complemented by analytical reflections on the differences in design, interaction, and performance between the two types of living labs. We show that an explicit focus on collaborative engagement in living labs can produce results that reflect shared experiences, community support, challenging established norms, and collective commitment toward change.