Facilitating Low-Carbon Living? A Comparison of Intervention Measures in Different Community-Based Initiatives

Abstract

Abstract:The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from "top-down" approaches in low-carbon municipalities to "bottom-up" approaches in intentional communities. This paper compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies. Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents' daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening current policy strategies.

Investigating patterns of local climate governance: How low‐carbon municipalities and intentional communities intervene in social practices

“…This conceptual framework has explicitly been developed because social practices are considered “a better target of intervention for sustainability policy than ‘behaviour,’ ‘choice’ or technical innovation alone” (Spurling et al, ). However, to the best of our knowledge, there are only a handful of studies that have made use of this framework to examine empirically existing low‐carbon activities and measures (Macrorie, Foulds, & Hargreaves, ; Schäfer et al, ). In this paper, we build on this framework to examine the ways in which low‐carbon measures in different types of communities (low‐carbon municipalities and intentional communities) succeed to intervene in social practices and to analyze the potential for enhancing the transformative depth of such interventions in low‐carbon municipalities.…”

Policy, polycentrism, and practice: Governance imaginaries in sustainability transitions

“…This, the authors conclude, may take longer, but holds the best chance for achieving “long‐term changes in everyday routines” (, p. 19).…”

“…A Eurocentric bias in the SPT literature has been noted (Spaargaren, ), frequently referring to the “interventions” of state actors in these countries as if they were on the outside reaching in (see Schäfer et al., ; Spurling et al., ). Labanca and Bertoldi, drawing from Smith and Stirling (), argue that this exhibits preferences for a “governance on the outside” approach, tending to “simplify by limiting and closing down the number and types of produced outputs and commitments” (, p. 499).…”

“…Widely cited in this respect are the policy interventions of re‐crafting practices, substituting practices, and changing how practices interlock (see Keller et al., ; Schäfer et al., ; Spurling et al, ). Re‐crafting practices entails reducing “the resource intensity of existing practices through changing the elements that make up those practices” (Spurling et al., , p. 10), substituting practices simply refers to replacing “less sustainable practices with more sustainable alternatives” (p. 11), and changing how practices interlock harnesses “the complex interactions between practices, so that change ripples through interconnected practices” (p. 13).…”

Understanding Resource Consumption in the Home, Community and Society through Behaviour and Social Practice Theories

“…The ideas of both socio-psychological theories and shared practices have been discussed in the literature as a "community of practice" [25,110] where communities are the site of learning by individuals. Interventions in practices and behaviours that consider communities of practice have been shown to be effective in research targeting changes in driving cars within small villages, cooking for large groups of people once a week, shared community gardens and shared compost systems [123,124]. Through creating a sense of community between people, the impact that practice or behaviour has through sharing skills and being visible is increased, normalising what is being done and highlighting the actions of a group and the need to change social practices for sustainable impact [101].…”