Practicing the Cultural Green Economy: where now for environmental social science?

Accepted version of paper published in Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 96 (3): 231–243.

Stewart BarrSchool of GeographyUniversity of ExeterAmory BuildingRennes DriveExeter, EX4 4RJUnited Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1392 263832Fax: +44 (0)1392 263342E-mail: S.W.Barr@exeter.ac.uk

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Abstract

Debates concerning the development of the Green Economy necessarily focus on ‘upstream’

issues that underpin the re-structuring of national and regional economies through the lenses

of financial, institutional and regulatory change. However, the growing interest in the

Cultural Green Economy requires a re-scaling of debates surrounding the links that occur in

complex socio-technical systems, notably between individual consumers, social units and the

architectures of the developing Green Economy. This necessitates a research and policy

agenda that is attentive to both the complexities of such interactions (between structures,

processes and practices) and the imperative to foster change in practices within wider society.

This paper explores the ways in which environmental social scientists have examined and

evidenced these issues, arguing that two major barriers still exist for creating adequate

understandings and opportunities for change. First, the overt focus on the individual

consumer as a unit of measurement and political attention has stifled debate concerning the

ways in which environmentally related social practices have developed in association with

wider economic contexts. In this way, environmental social scientists have often failed to

make the connections between individuals, practices and the economic system. Second, in

adopting a largely individualistic perspective, environmental social scientists have tended to

focus their attention on incrementalist and narrowly defined views of what ecological

citizenship might look like and constitute in the Green Economy. The paper therefore argues

that environmental social scientists need to constructively engage in a new inter-disciplinary

dialogue about the role, purpose and ethics of citizen participation in developing and

sustaining the Green Economy in an age of climate change and potential resource scarcity.

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1. Introduction

What does it mean to lead the ‘good life’? Within environmental philosophy (Holland, 2006;

O’Neill, 2008; Skidelsky and Skidelsky, 2012) and other debates on contested terms like

‘wellbeing’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘betterment’ (National Statistics, 2012), scholars have and

continue to raise fundamental questions about what a fulfilling and worthwhile life might

look like (Holland, 2006). Such a question might be regarded as tangential to the macro-

economic and up-scaled debates concerning the so-called Green Economy (see, for example,

the seminal work of Pearce (1988; 1991)); yet posing such a basic question is one that

environmental social scientists have done too infrequently in an academic culture dominated

by research which has often followed a Neo-liberal political agenda concerned with the

instrumentalism and incrementalist tendencies of ecological modernisation (Shove, 2010). To

put this question another way, in the broadest possible sense, what does a cultural green

economy look like when we begin to consider not how individuals and communities can

simply mitigate environmental problems, but rather to ask why we live and consume in the

ways that we do and how that relates (if at all) to the fulfilment of a good life?

In this paper I want to explore the ways in which environmental social scientists have

explored the relationships between the aspirations to create an ecologically modernised

economy through the deliverance of incrementalist and individualist ideologies of citizen-

state relations. In doing so, I want to argue that the bigger questions surrounding the creation

and promotion of a cultural green economy have been largely dodged by environmental

social scientists (although clearly not by all) in favour of understandings that say little about

how or why individuals relate to the economy in terms of the practices that develop and the

ways in which these interact with technology. Yet these questions are just the ones that we

ought to be asking as social scientists because they underpin the basic question being posed

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by policy makers regarding an understanding of the reasons people behave in the ways that

they do.

The paper starts by outlining the ways in which formations of the cultural green

economy relate to wider debates on the green economy, in particular highlighting the inter-

connected issues of scale that link individuals, practices, communities and technologies. This

is exemplified by the ‘social turn’ in sustainable development policy in the UK since the

early 1990’s. I then move on to explore the ways in which environmental social scientists

have come to conceptualise and operationalise research on the role of individuals as agents of

delivery through an analysis of the emergence of a behavioural change research agenda. In

particular, I look at the ways in which this agenda has links to and has been utilised by the

state through exploring the development of behaviour change policy within the UK

Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Through these lenses I

then develop two related critiques of current practice in environmental social science with the

use of data collected as part of a research project exploring sustainable travel. First, I explore

the dis-connected nature of research between individual behaviours, social practices and their

fundamental connections to economic structures is highlighted, emphasising the weakness of

approaches to understanding social responses to environmental change that focus largely on

individuals as units of measurement. Second, the paper highlights the incremental nature of

research in environmental social science which has tended to focus on the instrumentalist

analysis of behaviours that policy makers have deemed to be significant in reducing

environmental damage. In so doing, the paper questions why social science has become

somewhat of a ‘hand maiden’ of policy and, in the broader context of climate change, of the

climate science community, where social scientists are often commandeered to tackle the

outputs of models or forecasts which require change from members of society. Accordingly,

the paper finishes by calling for environmental social scientists to consider their role in not

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only engaging with policy makers but also in shaping the intellectual and policy agenda so as

to widen the intellectual landscape of how we vision a cultural green economy, a sustainable

society and possibly even a ‘good life’. In this way, the paper aims to explore some of the

critical issues involved in unpacking the notion of a green economy, in particular the role that

environmental citizenship can play in shifting consumer practices and fostering notions of

responsibility and also the ways in which scale acts as a critical intellectual framing device

for understanding the transition to a green economy through the interaction of institutional

and informal practices.

2. Nudging towards a Green Economy?

The very word ‘economy’ has connotations of grand and up-scaled structures that are

detached from the everyday lives of people, implying that the economy is ‘something out

there’ to be interacted with but not part of everyday life, culture and practice. I want to use

this notion of economy to argue that successive efforts to create and cultivate a green

economy have fallen short of appreciating the wider definition and practice of economy, in

particular the role of socio-cultural dimensions. Part of the issue with how the green economy

has emerged as a concept clearly originates in the very early institutionalisation of green

thought by natural scientists and economists (McCormick, 1989) through a form of

‘scientisation’ of environmental issues by bodies such as the Club of Rome (Meadows et al.,

1972). From the early 1970’s onwards the major thrust of so-called green economics has been

focused on up-scaled changes in national economies and markets to deliver an ecologically

modernised system of exchange (Pearce, 1988; 1991). Such an up-scaling has without doubt

been witnessed most strongly at the interface between the academy and policy, with the

broader socio-cultural implications of green economic thought advocated by early writers in

environmental philosophy (e.g. Carson (1962; Hardin (1968)) being largely confined to

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debate within academic contexts. What this up-scaling of green economic theorising brought

was nearly three decades of focus on the following inter-related but painfully narrow

propositions for a green economy. First, that ‘growth’ was still a term, concept and aspiration

that we should cling to, but de-couple from environmental degradation. Second, that

deliverance could be achieved through and within existing (often Neo-liberal) political

institutions and structures. Third, that shifts to a green economy could be achieved largely

through macro-level changes, not requiring the wider policy community and populace to

consider and reflect upon how everyday social practices related to the challenges being faced.

I want to argue here that whilst this third proposition has begun to change through the

re-focusing of much environmental policy on the role of citizens as consumers in changing

their individual behaviours, the characteristics of this shift have largely been framed by the

first two propositions, thus ensuring that what we know as a cultural green economy is

politically benign and lacking in ambition. In tackling this third proposition I want to

encourage social scientists who work on issues of behavioural change and social practice

theory for the environment to make a valuable and much needed contribution to the recent

attention concerning the importance of exploring the wider socio-technical and cultural

aspects of shifts in economic activity have been regarded as critical for generating change.

Indeed, recent interventions aimed at a broader framing of the cultural green economy

(Berndt and Boeckler, 2009; 2011) have focused their analysis on the cultural shifts required

within markets and the ways in which such markets and associated economic practices are

socially constructed (Caprotti, 2012; Hall, 2010). In this way, analysis has been shifted

towards notions of discourse and the role of social relations in constructing new market forms

for a green economy. Accordingly, I want to argue in this paper that it is incumbent on

environmental social sciences concerned with behaviour and practice to look beyond the

conventional modes of analysis (often framed by specific policy measures or behavioural

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change campaigns) towards contributing a more critical framing of the cultural green

economy, seen from the perspective of generating social transformation and providing the

cultural infrastructure for such changes.

2.1 ‘Socialising’ UK Sustainable Development Policy and Practice

An illustration of the three defining characteristics of conventional approaches towards the

green economy (centred on growth and Neo-liberal political agendas, both of which frame a

particular form of social response) can be evidenced in many forms, but an analysis of UK

government sustainable development policy provides a useful starting point for understanding

how there has been an upsurge in interest in the social dimensions to sustainable

development, whilst the basic assumptions underlying the political economy remain

unchallenged. As noted by commentators like Munton (1997), the UK’s first sustainable

development strategy (DoE, 1994) was avowedly orientated towards maintaining level of

economic performance and owed much of its content had the hallmarks of Thatcherite Neo-

liberal principles. Most notably, sustainable development was cast as a negotiation between

economic performance and the need to protect environmental resources in order to maintain

these levels of performance. Yet it was not long before social dimensions did emerge as a

critical point of focus in sustainable development policy, featuring in both of Labour’s

(DETR, 1999; DEFRA, 2005) sustainable development strategies. It is this latter document

that captured the essence of how the social was to be integrated into a framework for

sustainable development and thus a new green economy:

“We all – governments, businesses, families and communities, the public sector,

voluntary and community organisations – need to make different choices if we are to

achieve the vision of sustainable development. What we have done in the past has led

to some significant changes but failed to make that fundamental shift. [W]e propose a

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new approach based on research on what influences the way we choose now. This

brings together the levers that we have and gives greater recognition to some of the

social and practical factors that influence and limit our choices – and recognises that

we need a much more active approach to change habits”. (DEFRA, 2005, p. 25)

The fundamental recognition that the green economy is more than about macro-level

processes and products and the establishment of technology-centred ‘solutions’ to

environmental problems has been largely accepted by governments, as evidenced by the

progressive rise of ‘social’ issues in UK sustainable development strategies over the past 15

years (DETR, 1999; DEFRA, 2005). However, the ways in which governments like that in

the UK have adopted the message is intriguing and has come to be entwined, in part, with the

ways in which environmental social scientists have considered their own role in

understanding the cultural green economy.

Early engagement by governments like that of the UK with the idea that individual

citizens had a role to play in mitigating environmental problems started with the all too

familiar twinning of particular environmentally friendly behaviours with publicity campaigns

to encourage participation (Collins, 2004). Early examples of such campaigns include

Helping the Earth Begins at Home (Hinchliffe, 1996) and Going for Green (Collins, 2004),

both brainchilds of the then Conservative administration in the UK. In such campaigns, a

series of behavioural changes (related to energy use, water consumption, household waste

management and personal transport) were recommended to citizens aligned to global

environmental challenges. These forays into the world of public engagement were based on

three important assumptions that have received commentary from a range of environmental

social scientists (e.g. Burgess et al., 1998; Hobson, 2002; Owens, 2000). First, such

campaigns were based on the overriding notion that environmental issues were in the public

consciousness and that there was no need to make persuasive arguments about the need for

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action or the evidence underpinning this. Second, as we shall see later, such campaigns also

based their aspirations for success on the notion that providing information and raising

awareness would lead to behavioural change (Blake 1999). Third and more broadly speaking,

such campaigns were without doubt aligned to a framework that viewed public ‘participation’

in environmental issues as a one-way process of knowledge transfer from scientific experts to

those with lay understandings. early behavioural change campaigns were therefore reflective

of a traditional view of science-public relationalities that prescribed solution to complex

problems, outside of the realm of public debate and deliberation (Burgess et al., 1998; Eden,

1996; Lane et al., 2011).

I will investigate these assumptions in more detail later in the paper, but for the

present it is sufficient to note that these examples of early environmental campaigning on

behalf of governments highlighted a more concerning tendency in the ways in which

individual citizens were ‘boxed’ into the category of what Slocum (2004) has referred to as

‘passive’ citizens, undertaking prescribed and narrowly defined sets of behaviours. In this

way, although the valuable critiques of such early campaigns were vital in demonstrating

their processual weaknesses (e.g. Hinchliffe, 1996; Collins, 2004), the key issue I want to

identify in this paper is that the very basis of such messages and their attendant behaviours

was representative of an underlying political ideology that has come to govern debates about

the promotion of the cultural green economy.

2.2 An Economy of ‘Citizen-consumers’

In understanding this broader turn, we must look beyond the environmental realm towards the

ways in which the state has shifted towards a particular framing of Neo-liberal government-

citizen relations in the past thirty years. There are various accounts of the ways in which the

post-modern state (Giddens, 1991) has come to be ‘rolled back’ (Rose and Miller, 1992) as

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both super-national and sub-national modes of governing become more popular. Critically, as

Giddens (1991) has noted, the shift in late modernity towards Neo-liberal modes of governing

has come to mark the carving out of what he terms a new form of ‘life politics’ in which the

state is seeking to enrol ordinary citizens into the everyday responsibilities of modern life.

Clarke et al. (2007) refer to this new form of citizenry as ‘citizen-consumers’ and have

charted the ways in which the state has re-configured its relations with individuals through

both a reliance on traditional forms of communitarian ethics in personal practice (Etzioni,

1993) and the introduction of consumer choice as the most effective way for individuals to

act on these ethics. In the environmental realm, this has resulted in a form of ‘mainstreaming’

in which sites of citizen activism are also places of consumer choice, the logic being that in

modern capitalist economies, the most effective way to generate change is through

consumption (Seyfang, 2005; Spaargaren and Mol, 2008). As Dobson (2010) and Seyfang

(2005) have noted, this individualised expression of environmental decision making and

activism has resulted in new acts of ethical and green consumption that represent new forms

of choice architectures.

Within the UK, the interpretation of the citizen-consumer approach has been given

grater resonance in recent years by the adoption of a particular form of citizen-consumer

logics known as Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). Deriving from a form of behavioural

economics, Nudge Theory is being extensively used by a range of UK government

departments, including the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

(DEFRA) and the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), as a means of

delivering behavioural goals for the environment. The basis of Nudge is that consumers must

be able to have and exercise free choice in their decisions such that a nudge is:

“...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s

behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or

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significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere

nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges

are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge.

Banning junk food does not” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008, page 8).

Barr and Prillwitz (2014) argue that nudges are ways of the state moulding a choice

architecture for consumers and using devices within these architectural boundaries to

stimulate or regulate change. Such a notion is closely related to the recent critiques of UK

environmental behaviour change policy by Jones et al. (2011a; 2011b) and Whitehead et al.

(2011) in which they argue that the UK state has adopted a particular form of Libertarian

Paternalism that seeks to both enhance choice but to do so through specific lenses of moral,

ethical, environmental and economic practices. In this way, the state exercises power and

influence over the choices available and their acceptability within a Neo-liberal capitalist

framework, with the citizen-consumer acting within this limited space.

The adoption of an individualised praxis towards environmental decision making in

the UK therefore draws on these underlying notions of what role the citizen as consumer

plays in the modern state. The practical outworking of these notions is, of course, also of

concern in appreciating how particular behaviours come to be part of the choice architecture

and how individuals come to be subject to behavioural change programmes. Within the UK,

nudging has been operationalised through the adoption of marketing principles in the form of

Social Marketing (French et al., 2009). Using this approach, the focus is placed on

identifying key and specific behavioural goals, segmenting consumer audiences into target

groups based on the characteristics of individual consumers, and deriving an appropriate

marketing strategy, or ‘marketing mix’, for these behaviours and segments (National Social

Marketing Centre, 2008). This approach has been adopted by DEFRA (2008; 2011) in the

UK through its Framework for Environmental Behaviours and more recent Framework for

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Sustainable Lifestyles, in which twelve key behavioural goals have been outlined and will be

targeted at a selection of seven population segments in the UK.

As noted by Darnton and Sharp (2006), the intellectual basis for social marketing

strategies has traditionally relied on social-psychological understandings of behaviours and

consumer attitudes, and Shove (2010) and Jones et al. (2011a) have highlighted that the

adoption of these intellectual understandings within the UK policy community for promoting

environmental behaviour change has resulted in what Shove refers to as a ‘self sustaining’

paradigm of research and practice. Within this paradigm, a close relationship between social-

psychological understandings of behaviour and resultant policy initiatives forms a barrier to

alternative ways of conceptualising behaviours and understanding them in social context.

Indeed, at this ‘sharp end’ of policy implementation through forms of social marketing, the

citizen-consumer is utilised as a concept to frame specific behaviours as positive choices for

change to be enacted at the individual scale. The praxis of Libertarian Paternalism has

therefore reduced citizen choice architectures to a series of personal lifestyle changes based

within largely static infrastructures and an unquestioned model of political economy. It is this

limiting of citizen choice architectures and the ways in which policy has framed

‘environmental behaviour’ as a matter of segmented individual behaviours which this paper

seeks to question, offering instead an alternative conception of the cultural green economy for

both academics and wider society.

3. Greening Mobility: individual travel behaviours to mobile social practices?

As a vehicle for examining the current policy landscape and for exploring the potential for a

shift in the social science of the cultural green economy, I will draw on research undertaken

on the promotion of sustainable travel in the South West of England. As Chapman (2007) has

outlined, personal transport is a significant contributor to carbon emissions in the UK,

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derived from both travel for work and also leisure and tourism. Indeed, reducing personal car

use, the promotion of car sharing and the encouragement of individuals to reduce short haul

air travel have all featured as prominent policy goals in recent years (DEFRA, 2008; 2011).

The choice of transport and mobility as an example of the challenges posed by an

individualist and incrementalist approach to the cultural green economy is supported not only

by the social relations surrounding acts of mobility in contemporary society, but also the

implicit relationship mobility has with economic growth in advanced societies (Banister,

2008), which has locked in the associations between wealth creation, mobility and identity. In

this way, focusing on why and how we travel creates opportunities for understanding why

framing the cultural green economy around relatively minor changes in personal consumption

choices is flawed.

The research reported in this paper was undertaken during the autumn of 2009 in and

around the city of Exeter and aimed to provide a critical reflection on the utility of adopting

social marketing approaches for the promotion of lower carbon everyday and holiday travel.

In so doing, the research aimed to explore the challenges of adopting this politically

‘mainstreamed’ approach to understanding and promoting behavioural change in a key sector.

The research was based on a four stage strategy that initially involved the definition of

concepts surrounding sustainable travel and its promotion amongst a panel of local and

national stakeholders representing local authorities, the government office for the region, and

local and national campaign groups. On the basis of feedback from the stakeholder panel, ten

focus group sessions were held with members of the public, two within each of the five study

areas covered by the research. These study areas were selected according to the types of built

environment in and around the city of Exeter as a means of exploring the relationship

between residential context (for example high density ‘compact’ environments or low-density

suburban ‘sprawl’) and travel behaviour, a relationship which commentators like Kunstler

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(1994) have highlighted in their arguments concerning the interaction between structure and

agency (Kunstler, 1994). The study locations were: Polsloe (high density inner city

environment), Pennsylvania (low density established suburb); St. Loyes (low density modern

suburb on the outskirts of the city), Cullompton North (a commuter settlement on the edge of

a small market town) and Crediton St. Lawrence (a central urban area of a rural settlement).

The focus groups explored the ways in which participants framed everyday and

holiday travel, the practices they had established and the influences on such practices. On the

basis of the findings from these group meetings a questionnaire survey was developed to

examine the extent to which it would be possible to develop a segmentation model of

participants using social marketing principles. This survey was distributed to 2,000

households across the five study areas and resulted in 1,561 usable returns (see Barr and

Prillwitz, 2011).

Finally, as a way of re-contextualising the data gathered from the survey, participants

from the questionnaire sample were contacted to participate in a further five focus groups

(one in each study area), at which participants explored the ways in which they might be able

and willing to adopt different travel practices in the light of measures to mitigate against and

adapt to climate change in the future. Sets of scenarios were presented to participants as a

way of stimulating conversations about future mobilities, but these were used as stimulants to

conversation rather than detailed and prescriptive modes of governing mobility for climate

change.

The following two sections of the paper examine the data gathered from the focus

group research in the second and fourth stages of the project and are used here as discursive

devices to emphasise the broader strands I draw on from the literature. They are therefore

designed to be illustrative rather than either substantive or representative and in so doing act

as a vehicle for deploying two key arguments based on recent trends in the academy: first,

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that environmental social science and the policies which draw upon its knowledge needs to

recognise that there is an implicit relationship between what have become known as

behaviours and the practices on which they are based, which themselves are grounded in the

complex relationships between underlying norms, infrastructures and technologies. Second,

in adopting a practices perspective, environmental social science needs to rise to the

challenge of how we move beyond the incrementalism of behavioural change to link

ambitious changes in practice to an opening up of choice architectures that can realise forms

of social transformation.

4. From behaviour to practice

Recent policy developments in the UK highlight the increasing importance that has been

placed on the individual as a citizen-consumer, placed as the decision-maker exercising both

consumer sovereignty but also expected to act responsibly through environmentally benign

choices. This behavioural change agenda has partly been driven by a particular interpretation

(Whitehead et al., 2011) within policy communities of academic research on understanding

individual behaviours, in which research from social psychology has often been given

prominence. As noted previously, research along this trajectory has tended to focus on

understanding behaviour through either the exploration of existing theoretical models of

behaviour or the development of frameworks for behaviour that draw on a range of factors

that are believed to influence decision making (Barr and Prillwitz, 2014). What I want to

argue here is that a focus on behaviour as the main unit of analysis, and an emphasis on

individual factors that drive decision making, detracts us from looking at the broader scale of

social practice and the ways in which such practices emerge, are played out and change over

time and space. As I will go on to propose, without such a re-scaling of analysis, it will be

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difficult to consider how meaningful and lasting changes to foster a sustainable cultural green

economy can be realised.

The literature on social practice theory is rapidly growing (Shove et al., 2012) as

critiques have become commonplace in environmental social science of what Agyeman and

Angus (2003) have termed the ‘deficit model’ of environmental decision making, where the

perceived gap between attitudes and actions needs to be filled by information and attendance

to other ‘factors’ (Shove, 2010) that will intervene in the relationship between good

intentions and actions (Barr, 2003). By contrast, a social practices approach uplifts the

analytical focus from individuals and causative factors to consider the broader scaled

trajectories of practices (Shove, 2003) that are connected between individuals through social

units (households, working life, social networks). In this way:

“Social practices are conceived as being routine-driven, everyday activities situated in

time and space and shared by groups of people as part of their everyday life...Social

practices form the historically shaped, concrete interaction points between, on the one

hand actors, with their lifestyles and routines, and on the other hand, modes of

provision with their infrastructures of rules and resources, including norms and

values” (Verbeek and Mommaas, 2008, page 634).

Utilising this definition, I propose the use of social practices as a vehicle for up-

scaling attention from individual behaviours to practices and in so doing providing a context

for their development in time and space. This particular interpretation of practice theory

builds on Shove’s (2003) argument that the importance of focusing on practices to uncover

the basis for existing ways of living and being. Accordingly, attention is not on particular

forms of environmentally damaging behaviours (for example, personal car use as opposed to

walking, cycling or public transport) but rather the underlying social practices that become

manifested in this way (for example, the practice of driving children to school, commuting to

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work by car or using out of town shopping centres). Such a perspective, I argue, is critical for

unlocking the relationship between economic and social organisation and the development of

so-called unsustainable behaviours.

By way of illustration, the data from the focus groups in the South West of England

provides some apposite illustrations of these points in relation to the specific issue of

sustainable mobility. To start with the contrast between behaviour and practice, participants

in the focus groups made connections between an environmentally damaging behaviour (car

travel) and the practice of flexible and long-hours working:

“…well I feel guilty about the pollution of the car but I just have to [use the car]

….with the nature of my work, because I am self employed I can work anything

between 80 and 60 hours a week and very flexible hours. So you know I might need

to pop into [town for] 2 hours, I might need to come back later, I might need to have a

passenger, I might need to go onto hospital. It’s just absolutely impossible to do by

bus” (Cheryl, Crediton).

In this way, although the behavioural characteristic of car driving is recognised as a

negative, the overriding and implicitly accepted social practice of car-based working is what

dominates the discourse.

A focus on practices therefore necessitates an unpacking of the assumptions associated with

particular forms of living and being and how everyday and ‘mundane’ routines emerge. This

temporal component is particularly important when analysing practices because it charts the

ways in which broader social changes have an influence on current practices:

“When we were not such an insulated society, for example, people who worked at

Dagenham, Fords of Dagenham or somewhere like that, they ran car clubs, because

they all worked at the same place and they all started at the same time, or whatever

shift there was, the cars were then loaded with guys ‘it’s your turn to drive’ that

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doesn’t work. More people today live alone. Now young people your age who have

their own house are not part of anything like that, they have their own transport, they

do everything on the internet. So there’s no society as it was like that. No nuclear

family, or in large family, people don’t work like that anymore. That’s the big

change” (Thomas, Cullompton).

Yet a focus solely on the social dimension only provides a partial perspective. Many

social practices that underlie environmentally damaging behaviours are associated with the

emergence and interaction of practices with new forms of technology and changes to

infrastructures (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Hargreaves et al., 2011). Clearly the technology

of the private motor car, as Kunstler (1994; 1998) has described with reference to the

development of American suburban living, has impacted greatly on how the social practice of

suburban lifestyles and their associated values and norms have developed. Indeed, this

technology has also necessitated and permitted the justification of new forms of infrastructure

that further embed the social practice of car driving as regularised, normative activity, as

illustrated by the comment on out of town shopping developments:

“…Our towns…we are still planning and building our town of Exeter around the car

we haven’t stopped that. You know Toys R Us [toy superstore] has just opened in

Sowton, which is clearly built for the car isn’t it; you know you can’t walk there or

cycle there as a family. It’s built a big car park: you are going to drive there [and]

park up” (Matt, Polsloe).

Accordingly, a social practices perspective places individual behaviours within a

contextual frame of practice across time and space and does so through the analytical lens of

social interactions with technology and infrastructures. Consequently, I argue that

environmental social science needs to make a stronger case for such an analytical approach to

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policy makers and practitioners given the imperatives surrounding the transition to a green

economy. In effect, I argue here that in understanding how we might create viable changes in

social practices, we must attend not only to how these practices become outworked in

everyday life through particular forms of environmental behaviours, but how practices

interact with new technologies of living and the infrastructures that govern the mundane

routines of everyday life. In so doing, the debate on a truly cultural green economy must

address not only what individuals do, but the nature of the so-called choice architectures

within which they operate.

5. From instrumentalism to social transformation

The second argument I wish to pursue through the empirical lens of sustainable mobility

therefore relates to the focus that environmental social scientists and behavioural change

policy makers have placed on a narrow conceptualisation of change and the role of

citizenship, in particular collective forms of citizenry, in visioning and delivering change.

What I want to argue here is that environmental social science has largely followed rather

than set the agenda for critically exploring the role of citizens in shaping future agendas.

Moreover, we haven’t deeply questioned the nature of the so-called choices that are implicit

in the behavioural goals that are set within policy frameworks for change. Yet much of the

empirical research that we have generated in the past ten years or so has clearly indicated that

in framing ideas of choice architecture (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) around a model of

Libertarian Paternalism, the number and scope of choices is necessarily limited and

fundamentally instrumentalist in nature. This is not to dismiss the notion of choice as a

positive above strict regulation, but rather to question the current political positioning of

choice as something that is firmly governed by the state and is placed within the bounds of

Neo-liberal interpretations of economic growth.

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In basic terms, the question becomes one about the scope of choice and the type of

economy that will emerge from such choices. The participants from the focus groups on

sustainable travel framed this by comparing current individual choice mechanisms (for

example, reducing car use, using different forms of transport on occasions) to the

opportunities posed by collective choice mechanisms. In essence, the discourse that emerged

was one that emphasised the ways in which broader social and economic structures governed

choice mechanisms:

“…it is hard to see how we could radically reduce the number of cars without

restructuring the way everyone works, lives, moves around you know” (Tim, Polsloe).

This quotation raises the important issue of how publics feel locked into certain ways

of living in everyday contexts, but it also hints at the potential for social transformation

through re-structuring. And this is where the potential for formulating a new research and

policy agenda has the potential to avoid the risk of viewing the practices perspective as one

that pits agency against structure or limits choice within narrow architectures. Rather it raises

the issue of how environmental social scientists can set a new agenda based on a new politics

of engagement and democracy for the cultural green economy.

I therefore want to set out two ways in which this might be conceptualised through

exploring the current barriers to a re-framing of politics for social transformation. The first of

these calls on environmental social scientists to shift their focus away solely from the

individual and the behavioural to the collective and the political. Within the focus group

research, it was clear that participants were able to make links between wider issues of

political economy and how such a framing of policy is outworked in the ways that individuals

respond:

“Really comes down to that, [I] don’t have a lot of faith in them [government], so

people are more individual and the more individual you become and the more

20

technology allows you to become more of an individual, so unless you are really

bothered about the rest of society…” (Thomas Cullompton).

A re-alignment of environmental social science along a socio-political trajectory is

one that several scholars have called for in recent years (Dobson, 2010; Seyfang, 2005),

invoking the notion that environmental citizenship needs to be conceptualised as something

which is enabling and empowering to citizens, involving them as participants in a process of

social change. In this way, there are issues that arise about both the capacity of the current

political system to deliver on environmental citizenship, alongside the mechanisms by which

any alternative system, appropriately scaled, could deliver change. This will mean working in

different ways, with both citizens and policy makers and it is to these issues that I now turn.

A second area on which we need to focus is therefore the ways in which

contemporary modes of policy making on the environment produce significant contradictions

which form a barrier to the legitimacy of policies. This up-scaling of work responds to a well

known but largely under-studied characteristic of environmental governance and its

connection to citizens:

“I think it’s totally confused actually. I mean I don’t think the Government has a

consistent policy, particularly going through the economic situation we are, where on

one hand the Government wants more and more cars to be sold, and on the other hand

they are saying they want people to use public transport, not cars” (Thomas, St.

Loyes).

Although ‘joined up government’ is not a new theme by any means, the wider

intellectual point here is that environmental social scientists have focused on particular

aspects of government policy on sustainable development without making critical links

across sectors and questioning the broader forms of governance that relate to the cultural

green economy. Once again, there is an opportunity here for environmental social science not

21

merely to observe and to critique, but to think creatively about the ways in which they can

meaningfully engage policy makers in discussions about ideas of social transformation. As

with the process of understanding social practices and working with communities to co-

produce change, it will become incumbent on environmental social science to find ways to

engage policy makers that both gains access to governance structures but also presents a

challenge to existing orthodoxies concerning policy and practice. Once again, this will

require a re-alignment of existing working practices in the environmental social sciences,

where social scientists assume a far greater level of engagement with policy makers and in

this way begin to challenge to established assumption that evidence is reliant largely on the

outputs from the physical sciences or economics. Such a political re-alignment of

environmental social science gets to the heart of how we as social researchers can begin to

shape an agenda for the cultural green economy that asks questions not about how society

and the economy should merely adapt to issues like climate change, but rather what type of

society and economy we want to create. This means placing environmental social science at

the forefront of policies for climate change and enabling policy makers to consider the broad

trajectory of measures that will be required to live prosperously in a low carbon future.

6. Conclusion: creating a new vision for environmental social science in the Green

Economy

This paper has at its heart two radical changes that environmental social science can make to

respond to the necessity for building a green economy and for doing so in such a way that

makes explicit the challenge of social transformations that are likely to be needed in a climate

changed world. Specifically, the founding of a cultural green economy will require

environmental social scientists to consider how individual behaviours are conceptualised as

social practices of consumption and how these are intimately connected to broader social and

22

economic processes and technologies. Indeed, in forging this broader research agenda,

environmental social science also needs to examine how it can viably interact with the policy

community to collaboratively develop a shift from incrementalist perspectives towards more

radical ideas of social and technological transformation.

These two agendas are clearly related in that they place a greater emphasis on the

importance of underlying social structures as a lens through which to view debates on

environmental citizenship (Dobson, 2010). In the final section of the paper, I therefore want

to suggest three points of departure for researchers seeking to develop research agendas for

delivering environmental citizenship in a new green economy.

First, as the empirical research in this paper has highlighted, environmental social

scientists need to be more attentive to the social. Shove et al.’s (2012, p.1) recent work on the

dynamics of social practice has emphasised the importance, within the context of the

environment and climate change, of asking some basic but fundamental questions: “How do

societies change? Why do they stay much the same?” These are questions that have often

been at the heart of much inquiry in the environmental social sciences, but they have been

framed by a focus on individuals as the major source of change and therefore the primary

target of both academics and policy makers. For example, the special issue of the Journal of

Social Issues over ten years ago (see Oskamp, 2000) posed the same basic questions and

argued cogently that resolving environmental dilemmas was indeed a challenge for social

scientists. Yet this form of social science followed the dominant trajectory of

conceptualisations based within quantitative social psychology grounded on the assumption

that individual behaviours rather than social practices were the logical focus (Shove, 2010).

A re-focusing of environmental social science on the social therefore seems overdue,

to say the least. Shove et al. (2012, p.1) argue that the dynamic aspects of social practice

represent an “...as yet untapped potential for understanding change”. The question which

23

remains is how environmental social science constructs a coherent approach to the study of

practice that generates research capacity across the various disciplines of sociology,

psychology, geography and so on. Current intellectual framings of ‘environmental practice’

are conceptually different to those of ‘environmental behaviour’ (Spaargaren and Mol, 2008)

and these are inevitably reflected in the methodological principles and practices of

researchers within different disciplines (Verbeek and Mommaas, 2008). To this extent,

environmental social science needs to take a step back from the pursuit of one particular

intellectual agenda and consider, in the light of issues like climate change, the ways in which

it responds as a community of scholars to the need for a re-discovery of the social in

environmental social science. In so doing, it will require a new openness to intellectual debate

that has been so often suppressed by disciplinary structures and funding regimes and, in the

short term, will necessitate a focus not on the ‘issue’ of environment but rather the practice of

being a social scientist, motivated by the study of social change and its implications for future

generations. For geographers contributing to this debate, there are significant opportunities to

bring our expertise as spatial analysts to the table in the spirit of intellectual collaboration and

reflection. In particular, we can encourage scholars to be attentive to the ways in which the

forms of political economy that (re)produce practices are spatially configured and how and

planning systems represent contemporary regimes of governing the environment and

populations. As the research reported in this paper has demonstrated, there are valuable

relationships we need to uncover between economic systems, spatial planning and design,

and mobility practices.

Achieving such a dialogue that deals with these key intellectual and underpinning

questions is fraught with challenges, not least because there is growing concern for academic

research to have social and economic impact that can be measured and assessed using metrics

that derive from the study of economics. Accordingly, environmental social science also has

24

a role in challenging the dominant political framing of environmental behaviour that has

come to dominate the funding agendas of research councils and government departments and

agencies. Although Nudge (Cabinet Office, 2012; Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) is its

contemporary incarnation, the adoption of a citizen-consumer perspective by states like the

UK (Clarke et al., 2007) has had a major impact on the ways in which environmental social

scientists have framed their research on the social dimensions of environmental change. A

key driver for research funding by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2013),

the focus on ‘influencing behaviour’ as a lever for policy delivery has been highly influential

in perpetuating a research culture that has become closely aligned with the principles of

Libertarian Paternalism (Jones et al., 2011b) which has sought to understand how key

behaviours (defined by the state) can be promoted to citizen-consumers. Yet it is only

recently that critiques of this approach have begun to emerge (Whitehead et al., 2011) and in

so doing they have focused on the particular ways in which the state has (re)interpreted social

science research within specific political agendas.

A key role for social science will therefore be to critically explore the very basis for

the funding that so many of us have received over the years for research on individual

behaviours and the success or otherwise of strategies like Nudge and social marketing

campaigns. In arguing for change, environmental social scientists will need to once again ask

some basic but fundamental questions concerning the role of the state in governing issues like

climate change and the shift towards a green economy and how this can be achieved through

a reliance on individuals as agents of change in a consumption-based setting. As a

consequence, those of us who have spent our careers focusing on the dynamics of behaviour

change or social practice will need to engage more readily with the political dimensions of

the underlying governance frameworks that support individualist approaches for promoting

societal change. This will involve extrapolating our work on behaviour or practice so as to

25

contextualise it through the lenses of those working at national scales of environmental

governance (e.g. Clarke et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2011a; 2011b; Whitehead et al., 2011). In

other words, how can the social science of behaviour change and social practices become

more self-aware and begin to critique the frameworks that govern the citizen-consumer as a

policy device?

This revised political agenda for environmental social science leads to a third and

final call for our community to consider its relationship with policy makers and practitioners.

Here there are significant questions about the role of researchers in the policy process and the

advantages and pitfalls of becoming embroiled in policy making. As hinted at previously, the

relationship between academic research, policy making and practice has become

progressively blurred through the interest government has expressed in environmental

behaviour research and the increasing emphasis being placed on the demonstration of

research impact as a condition and assessment of funding for academic research. What I want

to argue here is that we do need to work alongside policy makers and practitioners but in a

way that makes transparent the scale of the challenges which our society faces when seeking

to deal with issues like climate change. This partly comes down to our integrity as researchers

and the extent to which we are willing to pose the most challenging questions in the face of

competitive research funding applications and a focus on providing quick and simple

deliverables. Yet we have a duty to argue, where our evidence is clear, that the types of social

change required to deal with environmental challenges like climate change and the shift to a

green economy are likely to be based on collective, social change and that such change will

be delivered through major socio-technical transformations in the ways we live our lives.

Such transformations are therefore about more than persuading people to use public

transport or fewer people to leave lights on in unused rooms. Rather, it is about providing the

enabling capacity of changes in wider social and technical ‘choice architectures’, as we might

26

put it. In this way, the discussions we might have with policy makers are more likely to be

about how society will have to change in the future and what a desirable transition might look

like. It is very explicitly about not accepting the status quo but advocating radical thinking in

policy communities about changing the architectures of living which surround us and how

these come to be accepted as everyday, as new materialities and practices. In essence, it is

about a dialogue that questions, for example, the way we build our towns and cities and the

consequences that such decisions have for travel, energy use and water consumption. In so

doing, it is about unpacking expectations and literally asking whether we should need or even

want to ‘keep the lights on’ all of the time, a phenomenon which we have only relatively

recently become accustomed.

In essence therefore, what I am proposing through this paper is a series of changes in

environmental social science that equip us for the challenges of climate change and moving

towards a green economy that will require a form or forms of social transformation. A re-

focusing of our work onto the social and transformative components is critical, but this can

only be achieved alongside change within our own community through our own practices and

engagement with policy communities. So much empirical evidence, a small portion of which

is presented in this paper, demonstrates that radical shifts in practices are unlikely to occur

through adopting current research or policy approaches. It is now time to act on this evidence

and find the appetite for intellectual change that Shove (2010) has argued is still lacking in

environmental social science. Indeed, it is about getting back to posing the fundamental

questions that social science needs to ask about the role of citizenship and the modes of

transition in society that this special edition has sought to explore, because it seems like we

have assumed that there simply is no other way to live and no hope of transforming our

society.

27

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