“Throughout the history of both modern environmentalism and development there has existed an insistent undercurrent of practical, grassroots initiatives seeking socially just and environmentally sustainable forms of production and consumption”. […]
Though largely forgotten now, Technology Networks were community-based prototyping workshops supported by the Greater London Council from 1983 until 1986. This article in the Journal of Peer Production provides a […]
Newly posted (pdf) to the site is a literature review on grassroots digital fabrication by Sabine Hielscher and Adrian Smith at SPRU (Science & Technology Policy Research). Community-based digital fabrication workshops (such […]
An international study of community currency niches Community action for sustainability is an often-overlooked, yet potentially promising site of socio-technical innovation. In this paper we test the applicability of co-evolutionary […]
We have a new working paper from our project Grassroots innovations in historical and comparative perspective. Mariano Fressoli from Fundación Cenit and Rafael Dias from UNICAMP have just published a […]
A new article from the project, Grassroots innovation movements in historical and comparative perspective, is available in the journal Innovation & Development. The article gives an account of relations between […]
System-changing innovations for sustainability transitions are pro- posed to emerge in radical innovative niches. ‘Strategic Niche Management’ theory predicts that niche-level actors and networks will aggregate learning from local projects, […]
This working paper introduces the topic of grassroots innovation in digital fabrication and develops a framework for its analysis. Grassroots digital fabrication […]
The latest issue of the leading research journal Global Environmental Change is dedicated to the topic of grassroots innovation for sustainability. The special issue contains six original research articles Guest […]
Technologies for social inclusion in Latin America are a recent manifestation of grassroots innovation movements whose global activities go back to appropriate technology in the 1970s and earlier. Common to […]
Community energy has been proposed as a new policy tool to help achieve the transition to a low-carbon energy system, but the evidence base for this strategy is partial and […]
A new working paper presents new evidence from our 12 in-depth case studies of community energy projects in the UK and explores how useful ‘niche management’ theory is in helping […]
Ambitious government and utility targets for renewable energy as part of a ‘low carbon transition’ mean that the winds and waves of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland have a […]
The multilevel perspective and social practice theory have emerged as competing approaches for understanding the complexity of sociotechnical change. The relationship between these two different camps has, on occasions, been […]
Sabine Hielscher, Gill Seyfang and Adrian Smith from the CISE project have a chapter in a new book on Innovations in Sustainable Consumption. Hielscher, S., Seyfang, G. and Smith, A. […]
Parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informed by ecological economics perspectives on development, value, economic scale and growth, and responding to […]
A new working paper presents results of our survey of community energy projects in the UK. Our survey investigates the objectives, origins and development of these groups across the UK, their activities and their networking activities as a sector. We also examine the strengths and weaknesses of these groups, along with the opportunities and threats presented by wider socioeconomic and political contexts, in order to improve understanding of the sector’s potential and the challenges it faces.
A new working paper presents a niche analysis of community currencies for sustainability. Over the last decade, the nascent field of Sustainability Transitions has sought to explain the conditions […]
The challenges of sustainable development (and climate change and peak oil, in particular) demand system-wide transformations in sociotechnical systems of provision. An academic literature around coevolutionary innovation for sustainability has […]
Grassroots Innovations 