In an influential paper, Elizabeth Shove (2010) criticised what she saw as a one- model-fits-all emphasis on individualistic, cognitivistic and behavioural approaches in contemporary environmental policy debates, usually drawing on
“the dominant paradigms of economics and psychology” (p. 1274).19 Shove
19 While her focus tends to narrow down to climate change, the point maps onto other environmental challenges which are all -too-often ignored in this literature.
identified the core element of this dominant approach –“which locates citizens as
consumers and decision makers and which positions governments and other institutions as enablers whose role is to induce people to make pro-environmental
decisions for themselves” – to be the ABC model: that is, focusing on cultivating better Attitudes, leading to improved Behaviour and more sustainable Choices. Policy in the realm of sustainability often assumes that the primary problem to be faced is that individuals lack sufficient information to act to protect the environment, or are inadequately incentivised to do so. Thus the field is
“dominated by efforts to nudge behaviour, modify attitudes and encourage
individuals to make better, greener choices” (Shove, 2014: 415). While pro- environmental activists and campaigners run awareness campaigns to educate the populace, or policy bodies publish reports with titles such as Changing Behaviour Through Policy Making or Motivating Sustainable Consumption, such work, for Shove (2010), reinforces problematic assumptions by falling back on a specific model of the human-as-agent; that is, viewing society as constituted by ‘citizen consumers’ or individualistic actors. Sen (2013: 7) notes, for example, that the Brundtland Report, contained a conception of humanity which assumed people as
'consumers' or as simply 'people with needs’, while Moloney and Strengers (2014: 95) similarly note how the caricature of a 'citizen consumer' implied in policy “fits
within the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism (and within the broader goals of
capitalism).”
Shove’s conceptual move is to draw on a genealogy of practice theorists to
emphasise the important role of less discursive, and more mundane, everyday behaviours in causing environmental degradation (Duguid, 2005; Meyer and Kersten, 2016). Shove et al. (2012: 3) note that in theories of practice “the greater
part of the processes at stake do not lie within the realm of discursive
consciousness”, and draw on the work of pragmatists like William James and John Dewey who accorded great importance to “embodied skills and know-how and the contention that experience is best understood not as an outcome of events
and intentional actions, but as an ongoing process or flow in which habits and routines are continually challenged and transformed” (p. 5; see also Duguid, 2005).
Practices, as Reckwitz (2017: 115) notes, “are anchored in the bodies of individuals and act through them.” In a widely-cited definition, he elaborates that a practice
“is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental
activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of
understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge”
(Reckwitz, 2002: 249).
Brown and Duguid (2001: 203) note the “ambiguity” of the term practice,
signifying “both work itself (the practice of a medical practitioner, for example),
and rote tasks or exercises designed to help learn to work (as in piano practice)”. As such, an important distinction exists in the literature between ‘practices-as-
entities’ (practices of cookery, say) and ‘practices-as-performance’ (instances of piano practice, say) (Røpke, 2009). There is an iterative relation between these two terms, with practice-as-performance referring to the situated and specific
‘doing’ of a practice (the topic of Chapter 4), and practice-as-entity (the topic of Chapter 5) referring to more collective (and often historical) notions of practices
as a “set of interconnected heterogeneous elements”.
Shove and colleagues (Shove et al., 2012) have simplified Reckwitz’s diverse
‘elements’, quoted above, into three major ‘elements of practice’: materials, meanings and competences. Materials, here, comprise “things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made”, meanings
relates to “symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations”, while competence “encompasses skill, know-how and technique” (p. 14). For its parsimonious simplicity, it is this tripartite categorisation of practice elements which shall be used when discussing the social practices of community workshops in Chapter 5.
Instead of persuading individuals to change their behaviour, one by one, practice theorists advocate for a more emergent, nonlinear, polycentric and complex vision of how pro-environmental behaviour change comes about, emphasising the emergence and decline of various social practices (Maller and Strengers, 2015; Shove and Walker, 2010). For instance, Shove (2014: 426) calls for the “building
[of] networks and coalitions and constructing partnerships that make the
conditions of sustainable practice possible”, with the practical consequences of such an intervention “likely to be unstable and unpredictable in that the practices
they seek to shape are subject to ongoing reproduction/transformation” (p. 427).
Regarding this instability, she notes (2010: 1278) that “these are not processes over which any one set of actors has control”. Instead:
transitions toward sustainability do not depend on policy makers persuading individuals to make sacrifices, specified with reference to taken-for-granted benchmarks of normal non-sacrifice; or on increasing the efficiency with which current standards are met. Instead, relevant societal innovation is that in which contemporary rules of the game are eroded; in which the status quo is called into question; and in which more sustainable regimes of technologies, routines, forms of know how, conventions, markets and expectations take hold across all domains of daily life. (Ibid.)
For Kurz et al. (2015: 122), the social practice literature posits three primary routes towards intervening in, and altering, unsustainable practices. Firstly, policy makers
or other interested parties “could strive to reconfigure practice elements such that
less sustainable elements…become systematically less prominent and alternative, more sustainable, elements are promoted”. Secondly, “a practice orientation
encourages policy makers to consider whether one might seek to influence one
practice by targeting adjacent practices”. Finally, “policy makers might seek to
reconfigure social connections and networks through which practices circulate
and develop”. The latter entails recognising the role of communities of practice,
which, to take their examples, “might include groups of cyclists in a workplace
participants in a local organic vegetable box scheme exchanging recipes according
to which produce is plentiful each month”. All of these ‘interventions’, speak to Schatzki’s (2012) temporally-emergent notion of prefiguration, whereby material arrangements, infrastructures and other practice elements prefigure and influence the subsequent performance of practices.
The implication of conceptualising sustainable development in this more distributed manner is that achieving sustainability and wellbeing will be a multi- faceted, temporally- and spatially-diffuse process which involves more than externally-imposed environmental management, regulation, holding better attitudes or making better choices. Much of the formative literature in what has come to be called ‘Social Practice Theory’ (SPT) has focused on domestic behaviours within households, such as cooking and showering, or, less often, behaviours in the workplace, such as energy consumption practices around air conditioning. Therefore, though Shove (2017: 159) states that many practices
“involve making, repairing, adapting or somehow intervening in the lives and flows of things”, this thesis constitutes the first examination of practice theory at the level of shared workshop and community space.