Sustainable Practices

Social Theory and Climate Change

Elizabeth Shove, Nicola Spurling, Elizabeth Shove, Nicola Spurling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135094027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Conservazione e Tutela dell'Ambiente

Climate change is widely agreed to be one the greatest challenges facing society today. Mitigating and adapting to it is certain to require new ways of living. Thus far efforts to promote less resource-intensive habits and routines have centred on typically limited understandings of individual agency, choice and change. This book shows how much more the social sciences have to offer.

The contributors to Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change come from different disciplines – sociology, geography, economics and philosophy – but are alike in taking social theories of practice as a common point of reference. This volume explores questions which arise from this distinctive and fresh approach:

• how do practices and material elements circulate and intersect?
• how do complex infrastructures and systems form and break apart?
• how does the reproduction of social practice sustain related patterns of inequality and injustice?

This collection shows how social theories of practice can help us understand what societal transitions towards sustainability might involve, and how they might be achieved. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, environmental studies, geography, philosophy and economics, and to policy makers and advisors working in this field.

1 Sustainable Practices

Social Theory and Climate Change

Elizabeth Shove and Nicola Spurling

Introduction

This book is informed by three propositions: one is that consumption is usefully understood as an outcome of practice: people consume objects, resources and services not for their own sake but in the course of accomplishing social practices (Warde 2005). The second is that mitigating and adapting to climate change is sure to require different patterns both of consumption and daily life. In short, the challenge is one of imagining and realising versions of normal life that fit within the envelope of sustainability and that are resilient, adaptable and fair. Since this implies a substantial, systemic transition in what people do – in how they move around, what they eat, and how they spend their time – the third proposition is that social theories of practice provide an important intellectual resource for understanding and perhaps establishing social, institutional and infrastructural conditions in which much less resource intensive ways of life might take hold.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the resources needed to maintain Western European habits currently exceed the earth’s capacity by a factor of three. This has not always been so. In the 1970s, on average, European levels of consumption remained within limits which our planet could sustain. How ordinary ways of life have become so resource intensive in such a short space of time is one of the puzzles that runs through this book. There are different ways of approaching this topic. In popular and policy discourse it is usual to explain such changes as outcomes of individual choice. From this perspective, moving towards a more sustainable society depends on helping people to make better choices, for example by understanding the environmental impact of what they do. Ecological and carbon footprint calculators¹ are designed with this in mind. These calculators sum up the consequences of an individual’s diet, their mobility and the way they heat and light their home, presenting the results in simple graphs and figures. By adjusting responses to the calculator’s questions, people can quickly see how much difference they could make to the size of their ecological footprint by using the car less, being vegetarian, increasing the number of people who share the same home or taking holidays close to home.

Tools like this draw attention to contemporary expectations of ‘normal life’ (e.g. car ownership, number of people per household, number of holidays per year, etc.), demonstrating just how embedded and ordinary resource intensive lifestyles have become. Can individuals simply choose to reconfigure their lives in ways that meet the calculator’s demands? What other aspects of daily life would have to change? What would it mean to abandon the car, cut domestic energy consumption by a half or a third, move into a smaller home and share that space with others? In what sense are substantially more sustainable ways of living plausible given present transport systems, buildings and social conventions? Responses are sure to vary from case to case but the general pattern is clear. Bringing individual carbon or ecological footprints back into the range of ‘one planet’ is likely to require a radical redefinition of what counts as normal social practice, and of the institutions and infrastructures on which these arrangements depend.

This might seem like a massive, perhaps insurmountable, challenge but if we look to recent history or take note of contemporary variation, it is obvious that there is no single template to which daily life conforms. The range of social practices that constitute seemingly essential aspects of contemporary living are contingent and constantly shifting. For example, diets and habits of personal hygiene (showering, bathing, etc.) are on average quite unlike those that pertained fifty years ago, and there have been correspondingly significant developments in the technologies, meanings and competences involved. Taking a slightly broader view the total range of practices that constitute social life has also changed: what is normal today has not always been so and, as such, there is no reason to suppose that currently familiar arrangements will stay the same for very long. It is reasonable to expect transitions in the array of practices that constitute social life and the resources they require. From an environmental point of view, the question is whether social practices might develop in directions that lead, en masse, to a spectacular reduction in collective ecological and carbon footprints. Can we imagine how such change might come about, and if so, what further costs and consequences might follow?

In designing a book that addresses these questions, we focus on understanding how contemporary patterns of consumption come to be as they are, and how they might change – a project to which the social sciences have much to contribute. In embarking on this task, we make a number of broad assumptions about what sustainability means and how sustainable practice might be defined. Reducing resource use to a level that can be maintained by future generations seems like a reasonable goal, and is one that is addressed in several chapters. However, contributors do not imagine the existence of a single universally agreed template of what constitutes a lower carbon or more sustainable society. Other possible ambitions include those of scaling back carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions (with a focus on mitigating climate change), minimising the rate at which finite fossil fuels are depleted, preserving biodiversity, and addressing global inequalities in consumption and well being.

Voß and colleagues argue for an approach that ‘abandons the assumption of “one” adequate problem framing, “one” true prognosis of consequences, and “one” best way to go’ . . . as if this . . . ‘could be identified in an objective manner from a neutral, supervisory outlook on the (social–ecological) system as a whole’ (Voß and Bornemann 2011). Most, but perhaps not all, contributors to this book share something of the same reflexive stance. In so far as interpretations and definitions of sustainable goals come into view they are, for the most part, taken to be provisional and historically specific.

Theories of consumption have shifted over the past decade as attention has turned from individual consumers to the cultural, material and economic structuring of consumption (Cohen and Murphy 2001; Gronow and Warde 2001; Shove 2003; Southerton et al. 2004; van Vliet et al. 2005; Spaargaren 2011). Along the way, this literature has questioned behavioural representations of individual choice, underlined the environmental implications of ordinary consumption and argued for a focus on the services (e.g. lighting, heating, laundering, etc.) that resources make possible. The related conclusion that services are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life represents an important step, but more is required to explain how they evolve. In concentrating on these questions – how do more and less sustainable practices become established, and how do they diffuse? – this book moves the agenda on, and moves it in a direction that exploits recent developments in social theory. It does so by placing ‘practices’ centre- stage.

The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al. 2001) signalled renewed interest in theories of practice. The strategy of taking social practices, ordered across space and time, as the focus of enquiry sets such approaches apart from individualist and structuralist modes of thinking (Giddens 1984) and has further consequences for how processes of social reproduction and transformation are conceptualised. For example, rather than seeing change in the resource intensity of daily life as an outcome of individual choice, or of seemingly external social and economic forces, it makes sense to ask about how social practices evolve, and what this means for the use of energy, water and other natural resources. There is no one theory of practice and no such thing as ‘a’ practice approach, but in developing different aspects of the ‘practice turn’, and exploring its implications for sustainability, contributors to this collection address a series of related questions: how are practices defined and how do they change? What are the material elements of which practices are composed? How do practices circulate and travel, and how do they relate to each other? How can we understand power within systems of practice, and how and by whom are matters of value, including interpretations of well being and sustainability, reproduced and contested? In responding to these questions, authors make use of different disciplinary traditions, drawing on sociology, geography, science studies, economics and philosophy, and introduce empirical research on cycling, heating, cooling and eating. In combination, the result is an exploratory venture in which new lines of enquiry are opened up, and different threads developed: it is around these that the five parts of the book are organised.

How are Practices Defined and How do they Change?

The first two chapters deal with fundamental problems of definition and change. If practices are to figure as the basic unit of social enquiry, how are they to be recognised and known? Second, if social practices underpin consumption, how is it that new forms come into being and others disappear? In responding to the first question, Alan Warde’s discussion ‘What sort of a practice is eating?’, draws attention to the importance of formalisation and coordination. Some practices are relatively simple to spot in that they are bound and delimited by shared, somewhat formalised, descriptions, prescriptions and definitions of proper performance. These are the easy cases in that there is likely to be a readily observable trail of relatively unambiguous indicators – documents, rules and guides – demonstrating that a practice is ‘out there’, existing across space and time, and figuring as a recognisable entity that people can join, defect from or resist.

In trying to make sense of other more troublesome examples, like eating, Warde turns from questions of bounding (where does one practice end and another begin?) to matters of linkage and intersection (how are practices coordinated?). In moving into this territory, and in writing about compound practices, he brings new topics to the fore: in particular, what are the threads of interdependence that hold constellations and complexes of practice provisionally in place and how and why do these threads tighten and slacken? Rather than fretting about whether eating is, or is not, a practice in some absolute sense, the message and the practical methodological advice is to identify and compare stronger and weaker forms of coordination between components like those of shopping, preparing and consuming. This is useful guidance for those interested in analysing the trajectories of compound practices over time. It is also useful in thinking about how practices emerge, persist and disappear, this being the focus of Theodore Schatzki’s contribution entitled ‘The edge of change’.

Having taken care to distinguish between ongoing happening on the one hand, and change on the other, Schatzki writes about how practices, and bundles of practice, shape and in a sense generate each other. In his account, relevant processes include those of coalescence (in which rules, norms, understandings and arrangements combine), hybridisation (in which practices merge) and bifurcation (in which they split apart). In all of this, the complex relation between stability (which itself requires ongoing reproduction) and more transformative forms of evolution is very much in view, as are differential, but parallel, rates and types of change. These opening chapters elaborate concepts and definitions of social practice and frame much of what comes next, including more detailed empirical studies of transition and persistence in the materials and resource intensities of what people do.

The Materials of Practice

The goal of ‘dematerialising’ daily life, for example, by a factor of ten,² has been around for a while. The basic idea is that of developing technologies and techniques that allow people to do the same or more, but with less environmental impact. In exploring the uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs), Inge Røpke and Toke H. Christensen’s chapter on ‘Transitions in the wrong direction: digital technologies and daily life’, and Sari Yli-Kauhaluoma et al.’s chapter on ‘Mundane materials at work: paper in practice’, work as a pair. Both follow the adoption of new technologies, showing how novel material elements do, and do not, transform existing practices. The examples and cases discussed illustrate the resource implications of some of the more abstract processes of linkage, hybridisation and bifurcation introduced by Warde and Schatzki. In addition, these two chapters work with the suggestion that social practices depend on the active integration of elements, including meanings, competences and materials (Reckwitz 2002; Shove et al. 2012). In this context, the common challenge is to show how ICTs become embedded and how this affects related patterns of energy and resource consumption.

Two rather different pictures emerge. The first is one in which ICTs are quickly integrated into practices as diverse as horse riding, bird watching and keeping in touch with friends and family. As described, widespread use of ICTs tends to soften time-space constraints, leading to an intensification of daily life. This is not the only possible outcome. Røpke and Christensen argue that in other social and economic circumstances, ICTs might transform practices in very different ways, and in ways that do reduce consumption. The present trend is, nonetheless, one in which more is packed into the day, and more energy is used as a result. By contrast, the second narrative, based on a small scale study of office life, emphasises the persistent importance of paper as a medium through which separate practices are coordinated and organised. Yli-Kauhaluoma et al. contend that detailed analysis of these cross-cutting functions helps explain why the paperless office remains a myth, and why ICTs have not led to the dematerialisation of working life. Røpke and Christensen describe processes of rapid appropriation, whereas Yli-Kauhaluoma et al. emphasise much slower forms of co-evolution. However, both demonstrate the subtlety of material innovation in practice.

Though not spelled out in quite these terms, both chapters question simple, essentially technological, goals of dematerialisation. They do so by reminding us that ICTs (and paper) have multiple roles, figuring as elements necessary for the conduct of specific practices, but also bridging between different practices, and mattering for when and where these are reproduced. This argues for a correspondingly subtle analysis of the relation between materiality (including resources and forms of consumption that are important for carbon emissions and ecological footprints) and a multiplicity of practices. Later chapters take this discussion further, but before turning to these more systemic analyses, the next two chapters concentrate on how people become practitioners and hence how practices spread.

Sharing and Circulation

Social practices such as bathing, showering, driving and cycling vary in terms of how many people reproduce them, and where they are routinely enacted. In crude terms, we might say that some practices are bigger, more extensive, and more widely and frequently performed than others. To give two simple examples, at present in the UK, showering is more common than bathing, and driving is more common than cycling (in terms of time spent and kilometres travelled). Moving beyond the UK, what Urry (2004) refers to as the ‘system of automobility’ has become established across most countries of the world, so much so that driving has, in a sense, overtaken practices of cycling and walking. In theory, we might characterise the present state of any one practice at a particular point in time by mapping its geographic spread, the rate of recurrent performance, and the sheer number of ‘carriers’ or practitioners involved (Reckwitz, 2002). Should such maps exist, and should they be regularly revised, they might be used to track the movement and global circulation of more and less resource intensive practices (Shove 2009). Although there is no such atlas, understanding how practices spread remains important in thinking about where, and how, lower carbon ways of life might take hold.

Allison Hui’s empirical study of how ashtanga yoga and leisure walking have developed to become globally popular pursuits provides some clues. Hui suggests that the spread of a practice, its ‘circulation’, is related to the separate movements of people (carriers), and of materials and knowledge, these being ‘elements’ of practice, as defined by Reckwitz (2002) and by Shove et al. (2012). Hui’s central claim is that the circulation and persistence of requisite elements is a necessary condition for the diffusion of practices across space and time. A second related observation is that much travel is undertaken as a necessary part of doing certain practices. At first sight, neither yoga nor leisure walking requi...