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    <title>EconStor Collection: CSERGE Working Papers, University of East Anglia</title>
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    <title>Environmental policy discourse and its material objects: Bridging the gap with 'modest realism'</title>
    <link>http://hdl.handle.net/10419/48812</link>
    <description>Title: Environmental policy discourse and its material objects: Bridging the gap with 'modest realism'
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Authors: Galvin, Ray
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Abstract: Discourse theories offer a penetrating approach to environmental policy analysis, as they focus on the interpretive worlds produced in policy actors' utterances and writings, and the argumentative struggles that lead to one view dominating over others in a policy domain. However they fail to theorise the relationships between policy discourse and the material realities that are the objects of policy. This is because their social constructivist epistemology deprives them of criteria for judging the comparative reliability of scientists' and others' knowledge of these material objects. This limits their explanatory power, since the material world is a certain way, and therefore influences what policymakers can successfully do. This paper offers a 'modest realist' approach to fill this gap. It defends a thoroughly social constructivist understanding of knowledge, yet argues there are good grounds for maintaining that the knowledge of material objects produced in the natural sciences is far more reliable than that produced elsewhere. But such an approach demands trans-disciplinary skills of the policy analyst, including detailed engagement with the relevant area of natural science and its global peer-review community. When done carefully, this approach can add a further explanatory variable to policy analysis, namely the behaviour of the materiality the policy is aimed at.</description>
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    <title>Pro-environmental interaction: Engaging Goffman on pro-environmental behaviour change</title>
    <link>http://hdl.handle.net/10419/48804</link>
    <description>Title: Pro-environmental interaction: Engaging Goffman on pro-environmental behaviour change
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Authors: Hargreaves, Tom
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Abstract: Reductions in the environmental impacts of everyday life are increasingly accepted as a crucial part of any transition to a sustainable economy. Despite profound differences in how it should be achieved, the vast majority of recent research on such pro-environmental action recognises that it poses a fundamentally social challenge - demanding shifts not merely in individuals' attitudes and behaviours, but also in social norms, contexts and practices. Despite this general acceptance of the social nature of the problem, however, to date there has been very little attention paid to perhaps the most basic social medium: social interaction. To address this gap, the paper applies some of Erving Goffman's concepts to an ethnographic case study of a pro-environmental change initiative called Environment Champions. The analysis reveals how interaction processes can both help and hinder the spread of pro-environmental acts, and thus calls for them to be given further attention in future research.</description>
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    <title>Community innovation for sustainable energy</title>
    <link>http://hdl.handle.net/10419/48797</link>
    <description>Title: Community innovation for sustainable energy
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Authors: Hielscher, Sabine; Seyfang, Gill; Smith, Adrian
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Abstract: As in other countries, there is a growing public, policy and business interest in the UK in the roles and potential of community-led initiatives for sustainable energy consumption and production. Such initiatives include green lifestyle-based activities to reduce energy consumption (e.g. Transition Towns, and Carbon Reduction Action Groups), more traditional behaviour change initiatives such as neighbourhood insulation projects and energy-saving campaigns, as well as renewable energy generation projects such as community-owned windfarms and biofuel projects. Case studies of specific projects identify a variety of rationales amongst participants, whilst policy interest suggests a more instrumental concern for facilitating additional, larger-scale sustainable energy transitions. Amongst participant rationales are ideas that bottom-up, community-based projects deliver energy savings and behaviour changes that top-down policy instruments cannot achieve, due to the greater local knowledge and engagement they embody, the sense of common ownership and empowerment, and the social capital and trust that is generated among local actors. These resources provide organisational and values-based 'grassroots innovations' which experiment with new consumption practices based on alternative 'new economics' values. However, previous research shows 'grassroots innovations' face a series of critical challenges requiring support to overcome, in order to achieve their potential benefits more widely. This includes developing 'niche' networks for mobilising reforms both to highly centralised energy institutions and infrastructures, as well as deeply ingrained social practices of 'normal' energy consumption and everyday life. What makes this experience fascinating for the purposes of the SCORAI workshop is the way these community-based initiatives are trying to develop new energy-related consumption practices with a view to the socio-technical transition to local, renewable or lower carbon energy systems. Understandably, many projects remain practically focused on securing early successes and resourcing their long-term survival. However, the institutional and infrastructure reforms that will help in this endeavour require strategies for addressing the wider (national and international) political economy of consumption which adopts an ecological modernisation approach to sustainability. In surveying the community energy scene in the UK, our paper pays particular attention to this last issue.</description>
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  <item rdf:about="http://hdl.handle.net/10419/48796">
    <title>Sustainability transitions from the bottom-up: Civil society, the multi-level perspective and practice theory</title>
    <link>http://hdl.handle.net/10419/48796</link>
    <description>Title: Sustainability transitions from the bottom-up: Civil society, the multi-level perspective and practice theory
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Authors: Hargreaves, Tom; Haxeltine, Alex; Longhurst, Noel; Seyfang, Gill
&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;Abstract: This paper aims to build on an emerging trend in sustainability transitions research towards better understanding the potential roles played by civil society groups in transitions alongside state and market actors. Through the use of two empirical examples (a local and organic food producer cooperative called 'Eostre Organics' in East Anglia, UK, and the pro-environmental behaviour change programme 'EcoTeams'), the paper argues that whilst the Multi-Level Perspective on sustainability transitions is a valuable analytical tool to help conceptualise and distinguish between different kinds of civil society activity, its focus on single regimes and on novelty rather than normality means it cannot adequately capture the range or scope of civil society action. Here, we suggest that recent developments in Social Practice Theory, which explicitly address these concerns, offer a way to broaden and improve analyses. This leads us to re-examine a framework originally presented by Elizabeth Shove which draws attention to the connections and crossovers between these two theoretical approaches. The paper closes by exploring the gaps, limitations and implications of this framework for future research on the role of civil society groups in sustainability transitions.</description>
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