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...

The UK's energy transition (to a sustainable, low-carbon development path) may turn out to be highly dependant on the engendering and embedding of new types of social practice as well as on the widespread uptake of new low-carbon technologies. We argue that social change and social movements may...

The challenges of sustainable development (and climate change and peak oil in particular) demand system-wide transformations in socio-technical systems of provision. An academic literature around co-evolutionary innovation for sustainability has recently emerged to attempt to understand the...

Calls for pro-environmental behaviour change among individuals have become commonplace within the ecological modernist framework. To date, research on pro-environmental behaviour has tended to emphasise either the more or less rational decision-making processes undertaken by individuals, or the...

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...

Questions about the future of the energy system in the UK have, in recent years become deeply entangled with a number of previously discrete intellectual, commercial and policy domains. Not least, the emergence of what Hulme (2009) refers to as 'upper-case Climate Change' to distinguish this...

This paper outlines and attempts to develop an original and innovative approach to research on pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) by, for the first time, applying Flyvbjerg´s (2001) call for the development of phronetic social science to this burgeoning empirical subject. Based on this novel...

Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective. This paper applies 'new economics' theory to evaluate a local organic food initiative as a tool for 'alternative' sustainable consumption, which is here understood to mean redefining social infrastructure and...

Sustainable consumption is increasingly on the policy menu, and local organic food provision has been widely advocated as a practical means of making the desired changes to conventional production and consumption systems. This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of a local organic food...