In this paper we provide a timely account of how sustainable technologies become entangled with cultural practices and thus co-evolve, influencing energy consumption. In doing so, we critique the approach current UK policy takes towards energy renewal and carbon reduction.We investigate the effectiveness of the social housing sector's efforts to implement environmental policy initiatives that uses a technology-driven approach. By looking at how social housing residents consume energy as part of domestic practices, we identify tensions between strategies to influence energy consumption by a housing association, and the ways residents incorporate sustainable technologies into everyday practices. Our findings reveal how sustainable technologies become enrolled in established practices; residents creatively develop novel routine strategies to accommodate new technologies to their daily routines. We contend that policy efforts to engender 'behaviour change' through a technology-driven approach have limitations. This approach ignores how practices become entangled, affecting energy consumption.

Recent climate change statistics attribute over a quarter of carbon emissions to residential energy use in the UK. To address this, a building standard (Code for Sustainable Homes) was introduced to aim to reduce levels of carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption. This paper analyses how such an environmental standard reconfigures the socio-technological relations and practices of housing professionals that design, construct, and manage social housing. We focus on how actors engage with the standard's recommendation for incorporating low and zero carbon technologies into new buildings. We identify diverse practices that emerge from these engagements, which, we contend, have significant consequences for the working relationships of professional actors, and for renewable energy provision. By being entwined in, and generative of actors' practices, we argue that the Code becomes part of the socio-technological relationships and infrastructures that shape energy provision.2

Much of the debate on sustainability is predicated on the belief that environmental demands lead to the production of sustainable technologies that induce environmental benefits. This fails to account for the influential ways technologies are used in practice, and the interactions between users and technologies that shape their environmental effects. This article uses the example of how cars and their drivers together accomplish the practice of driving through their interactions with each other, and explores the implications this has for generating environmental outcomes. We draw on a body of literature that argues how together, users and technologies participate in carrying out practices that actively shape outcomes, and we show how and why this applies to sustainability. The article presents the case of the Toyota Prius, analyzing Toyota’s intent in designing a sustainable car and contrasting it with the perspectives of thirty-eight of its drivers. We find that the possibility for fuel and carbon reduction is coproduced and is a result of complex interactions between technology, drivers, and driving practice.

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Current policy externalises professional-technological interactions.Professional practises and sustainable technologies are mutually shaped. How energy is provided affects future energy consumption. Changes to professional practices influence energy provision. a b s t r a c tThis paper questions policy's approach to the implementation of sustainable technologies as part of the UK environmental policy (Code for Sustainable Homes-'the Code'). Current policy adopts a marketbased model promoting rational choice and technological determinism as a solution to the environmental challenges of carbon emissions and energy reduction. We argue that this approach externalises professional actors' situated practices by singling out isolated factors impeding policy's rationale of implementing the Code (e.g. cost). Drawing on our empirical study we identify diverse practices that transpire from professional-technology interactions, demonstrating how sustainable technologies and professional practices are mutually shaped. The important implication of our study is that these 'blackboxed' interactions directly impact on how energy is provided, with consequences for future energy consumption.