School of Global Studies

Individual lifestyles and practices play an important part in governmental strategies to improve environmental outcomes, both in the UK (DEFRA, 2008) and elsewhere. This often involves promoting actions deliberately aimed at reducing one’s environmental impact, or pro-environmental practices. However, our understanding of these practices has weaknesses; notably regarding the “Value-Action Gap” and the conditions promoting enduring change. This article explores how narrative methods could further our knowledge of pro-environmental practice. It illustrates the utility of the approach using the example of moments of sudden change, or “transformative moments”, in the lives of individuals who take action to address climate change. Drawing on three cases from an ongoing study, it uses narrative tools to explore the nature of these transformations, including the inter-related roles of context, information, emotions and relationships with other people. The discussion highlights tentative conclusions regarding these moments of sudden change, and offers suggestions for future research. Finally, it evaluates the utility of narrative approaches to pro-environmental practice, suggesting that despite some limitations, this method has significant potential to address unresolved issues in the field.

Climate change has become a major concern for research and policy in recent decades, and individual behaviour change has constituted a significant strand within UK Government responses to the problem. However, our understanding of how and why individuals become engaged in sustainable practices, and how their participation develops over time, remains patchy. Conventional psychological models have failed to resolve issues such as the "value-action gap"; however, new sociological approaches offer a more holistic understanding of sustainable practices. This study draws mainly on these "social practice" approaches to answer four questions: 1) How is "action on climate change" understood by the people performing it? 2) How does performance of these practices develop throughout the individual life-course? 3) What are the key processes that influence this development? 4) What lessons can we learn for the promotion of sustainable practices? It adopts an indepth, experience-based approach and employs a narrative-life-course methodology that combines loosely-structured biographical interviews with visual techniques.

Domestic energy practices are a topical policy issue, with implications for climate change, energy security and fuel poverty. Accordingly, a growing body of literature examines ways of promoting energy conservation and generation by individuals. However, there has been relatively little discussion of how status and stigma are implicated in these practices, and may act as facilitators or barriers to “behaviour change”. To help address this gap, this article draws both on existing literature and a new UK-based study of people who are attempting to live sustainable lives, to provide insights into how domestic energy practices may be status-enhancing or stigmatising, and how these risks and opportunities can be managed. While energy practices are often understood as “inconspicuous”, it is argued here that in some circumstances individuals may actively manage the visibility of their energy practices. The discussion considers these findings with regard to social power relations, and identifies issues warranting further exploration within the emerging research agenda on energy and equity.

It is widely recognised that fuel poverty has severe effects on some of the most vulnerable people in society. However, while attention has focussed on older people in fuel poverty, families and children have been relatively neglected.

Until now, the scale of the problem for families has been poorly understood. Some evidence comes from a Barnardo’s survey in which over 90 per cent of their staff said they worked with families in fuel debt. To pay their energy bills, many families were cutting back on essentials such as heating and food.

It is clear that fuel poverty can have severe and life-long effects on children. Studies show that long-term exposure to a cold home can affect weight gain in babies and young children, increase hospital admission rates for children and increase the severity and frequency of asthmatic symptoms. Children in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from breathing problems, and those in damp and mouldy homes are up to three times more likely to suffer from coughing, wheezing and respiratory illness, compared to those with warm, dry homes.

What’s more, struggling with high energy bills can impact adversely on the mental health of family members. Fuel poverty may even affect children’s education, if health problems keep them off school, or a cold home means there is no warm, separate room to do their homework.

It is vital that we understand the problem of fuel poverty for parents and children, and that future policies provide the support that these vulnerable families urgently need. This fact-file, prepared with the support of the Energy Bill Revolution, Barnado’s and Save the Children, provides a snapshot of families and (dependent) children in fuel poverty at the start of this year. It provides high-level estimates for the UK, England and the Devolved Nations. It then goes on to explore the nature and composition of fuel poverty amongst families and children, specifically in England.

The UK ranks so low despite the fact that it has amongst the lowest gas and electricity prices in Europe and relatively high household incomes compared to the other countries. And yet it has the highest rate of fuel poverty and amongst the highest rate of excess winter deaths. In this context, the poor energy efficiency of our housing stock emerges as the main cause of these problems. David Cameron recently pledged that he wanted the UK to become "the most energy efficient country in Europe". This ambition is all the more laudable and appropriate because this fact-file finds that presently, the UK can only be characterised as the 'cold man of Europe'.

People manage heat flows in their homes through diverse skilful engagements, including interactions with a wide range of materials that help to generate heat, move it around, or prevent its movement. Using these strategies, we try to ensure that heat is where it is needed, when it is needed, and can also try to minimise its wastage (heat-out-of place and heat-out-of-time). However, the practical knowledge or know-how used in managing these thermal flows has received little attention to date, despite its relevance to topical debates on energy consumption. This paper explores how experience-based know-how is used in monitoring and managing heat flows in the home. I also consider three processes that stimulate the development of new know-how: changes in the life-course, in material arrangements, and in shared understandings. These themes are illustrated using quotes from various sources, such as web forums and advice sites. Finally, I consider how these ideas relate to wider theories of experience and know-how, and offer some reflections on what this approach might mean for research, policy and practice on sustainable energy use.

A wide range of factors contribute
to families falling into debt. For
many families, energy debt is the
result of several factors combined
– including rises in energy
bills, inadequate home energy
efficiency and caring for disabled
children. Energy debts can be a
particular problem for families
already struggling to maintain
the everyday costs of
supporting children.
Our report reveals the range of
ways families respond to energy
debt and try to manage costs to
protect their family. More than
half of families who had been in
energy debt cut back on their
energy use. In some cases this was
achieved by families improving the
energy efficiency of their home or
by switching supplier. However,
in many other cases, they had to
resort to such stark choices as not
giving their children a hot meal,
hot bath, or even leaving a child’s
bedroom cold at night.

In 2013, in England and Wales, cold homes killed over four times as many people as road and
rail accidents; nearly four times as many people as drug misuse; and about as many people as
alcohol. In terms of number of deaths, cold homes were thirty times more lethal than fire.

In everyday life, people perform, reproduce and recreate many different practices which have implications for patterns of energy demand.  This paper focuses on thermal management at home, and explores everyday innovations and adaptations: techniques that are used by consumers who wish to limit their energy use while maintaining a warm home. This includes, for example, do-it-yourself home improvement; improvised forms of insulation and heating; novel ways of using appliances and technologies; and craft and the creation of new “products”. These everyday innovations are ignored by most energy efficiency policy, but may make a real difference to consumer experiences of thermal comfort, and to energy use.
The paper presents new empirical findings from a study of everyday innovation in domestic energy consumption, using an online methodology. To access a range of accounts, relevant sources (forums, articles and blogs with comments) were identified in four categories: money-saving; environment and ethics; home improvement and craft; and family and well-being. Three English-language sources were selected in each category, the main criterion being that they included a range of responses. The aim was to generate rich data, not represent a population. Thematic coding of the data focussed on the questions: 1) How do consumers innovate and adapt in trying to achieve thermal comfort services efficiently? 2) What factors support or limit these adaptations and innovations? The paper presents findings and considers how different theoretical perspectives interpret them. Psychology and behavioural studies offer some relevant concepts such as knowledge, values, perceived behavioural control and social norms. However, further insights are suggested by Social Practice Theory and Science and Technology Studies.  These approaches highlight processes of scripting, appropriation, tinkering and bricolage, and show how everyday adaptation and innovation are bound up with materials, know-how, shared understandings and rules.

By David Ayre, Lucy Capron, Pedro Guertler and Sarah Royston

The Warm and Informed project was launched in September 2014 as a partnership between Northern Gas Networks (NGN) and The Children’s Society, focusing on two low income areas of Bradford.  The findings in this report are based on:
 Five interviews with project workers and staff from Northern Gas Network
 17 interviews with service users accessing the Warm and Informed project
 16 interviews with service users that had not accessed the project
 Review of Key Performance Indicator data collected by the Bradford Children’s Centres
This evaluation report identifies key themes that have emerged from our interviews with families who have accessed the Warm and Informed project, and brings together our key findings about what worked, what issues there were, and what can be learned for an expansion of any similar work.

Non-energy policies can have major implications for energy demand, and the Invisible Energy Policy project takes on the challenge of identifying these unintended policy consequences in the UK public sector. This paper introduces the project and presents early findings from the first fieldwork phase on higher education, one of the UK's largest non-commercial consumers of energy. It outlines the project's research questions and context, and gives a brief overview of the methodology (including detailed investigation of two case-study universities). It then explores some emergent themes, considering how energy demand is governed and integrated within higher education; what is excluded from this; and how non-energy policies at the national and institutional scales interact to steer energy demand.

Paper presented at the DEMAND international conference, April 2016, Lancaster.  Please do not cite without permission.  The paper introduces the Invisible Energy Policy project and initial findings on energy governance in UK higher education.

Energy systems are not only affected by energy policies, but by a wide range of other policies. Yet there has been little systematic analysis of this issue, and the knowledge that does exist is often not integrated across disciplines and sectors. The aims of this scoping paper are to i) produce a comprehensive review of existing research on the impact of non-energy policies on energy systems; and on the basis of this ii) propose a future research agenda. The review employed a literature search using a set of keywords (shown in Appendix A), together with a snowball approach (using article bibliographies) and review of selected journals. In total, 576 relevant documents were found.

This article makes the case for a new and ambitious research and governance agenda for energy demand reduction. It argues that existing 'demand-side' approaches focused on promoting technological efficiency and informed individual consumption are unlikely to be adequate to achieving future carbon emissions reduction goals; it points out that very little attention has so far been paid to the impacts of non-energy policies on energy demand; and it submits that a much fuller integration of energy demand questions into policy is required. It advances a general framework, supported by illustrative examples, for understanding the impacts of 'non-energy' policies on energy demand. It reflects on why these connections have been so little explored and addressed within energy research and policy. And it argues that, for all their current 'invisibility', there is nonetheless scope for increasing the visibility of, and in effect 'mainstreaming', energy demand reduction objectives within other policy areas. Researchers and policymakers, we contend, need to develop better understandings of how energy demand might be made governable, and how non-energy policies might be revised, alone and in combination, to help steer long-term changes in energy demand.