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, […]
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 […]
Phedeas Stephanides Doctoral student 3S (Science, Society and Sustainability) Research Group, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK p.stephanides@uea.ac.uk @P_Stephanides website: sustainabilitycrisis.wordpress.com Phedeas’s PhD research […]
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 […]
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 […]
“Community food projects are not about food, and community energy projects are not about energy” was one of the conclusions from an international workshop of experts on ‘grassroots innovations’. These […]
A new working paper presents results of the first global scoping study of community currencies for sustainability. As a response to the unsustainability of current global financial systems, parallel sustainable […]
Abstract. The author critically evaluates the impact and potential of a community currencyöor local money systemöknown as the `local exchange trading scheme’ (LETS), to contribute to sustainable local development (SLD). […]
Purpose – Sustainable consumption is increasingly on the policy menu, and local organic food has been widely advocated as a practical tool to make changes to conventional production and consumption […]
Supermarkets such as Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) have responded to the growth in direct marketing and alternative agri-food networks by promoting local produce ranges, and increasingly sourcing organic produce from […]
Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective, but there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour that individuals can make within current socio-economic frameworks. […]
Seyfang, G. (2010) ‘Low-Carbon Communities and the Currencies of Change’ in Peters, M., Fudge, S. and Jackson, T. (eds) Low Carbon Communities: Imaginative approaches to combating climate change locally (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham) […]
On Thursday 11th November Adrian Smith was invited by YouGov to attend an event they were holding in Westminster on the topic, Sustainable Communities – Building the Big Society. It […]
Grassroots Innovations 