Facilitating Low-Carbon Living? A Comparison of Intervention Measures in Different Community-Based Initiatives

Schäfer, Martina and Hielscher, Sabine and Haas, Willi and Hausknost, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0496-5526 and Leitner, Michaela and Kunze, Iris and Mandl, Sylvia (2018) Facilitating Low-Carbon Living? A Comparison of Intervention Measures in Different Community-Based Initiatives. Sustainability, 10 (4). p. 1047. ISSN 2071-1050

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Abstract

The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from "top-down" approaches in low-carbon municipalities to "bottom-up" approaches in intentional communities. This paper compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies. Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents¿ daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening current policy strategies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Research was funded from 2015 to 2017 in the project COSIMA (Governing community-based social innovation for climate change mitigation and adaptation) by the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP) of the Climate and Energy Fund.The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from "top-down" approaches in low-carbon municipalities to "bottom-up" approaches in intentional communities. This paper compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies. Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents' daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening current policy strategies.
Keywords:	low-carbon municipalities; intentional communities; ecovillages; social practice theories; interventions in practices; low-carbon measures
Divisions:	Departments > Sozioökonomie
Version of the Document:	Published
Depositing User:	Gertraud Novotny
Date Deposited:	20 Dec 2018 07:28
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2019 08:21
Related URLs:	Publisher
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/89182/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/6752

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