Trials and evaluations of energy and water consumption feedback are premised on understandings of consumption as a rational and individual decision-making process. This article draws on two alternative conceptualizations of consumption to understand the role and effectiveness of consumption feedback delivered through an in-home display (IHD). The first considers how consumption is mediated by socio-technical systems of energy and water provision, and the second views it as part of social practices such as laundering, eating and heating. The article draws on these conceptualizations to analyse a qualitative dataset of interviews and tours with 28 Australian households participating in three separate IHD feedback programmes. The article finds that IHDs are an important visualization tool that illuminate otherwise invisible systems of energy and water provision. However, they have the potential to legitimize particular practices and to overlook those considered non-negotiable. The article concludes that IHDs can play a role in making socio-technical systems of energy and water provision more relevant to householders’ everyday lives, and in questioning and debating non-negotiable practices. This will necessitate repositioning and blurring the roles and responsibilities of resource providers and consumers. As a mediating device with the ability to extend both inside and outside the home, the IHD provides a unique platform for reorienting its role towards these ends.
This article analyzes how certain forms of unsustainable hypermobility -primarily air travelare embedded in the institutional orientations of Australian universities, and hence, into the professional practices of academics in the country. Academic air travel is commonly recognized as a key component of a scholar's ability to cultivate and maintain international collaborations, achieve high-impact journal publications and win large research grants. Despite the environmental sustainability implications that regular international and domestic air travel entails, a normative system of 'academic aeromobility' has developed. We discuss the results of a qualitative textual analysis of Australian university-sustainability policies as well as research and internationalization strategies. We find that the ambitions of academic institutions to reduce carbon emissions from air travel are discordant with broader policies and strategic orientations around international mobility. These findings foreground the paradoxical relationship between many university-sustainability policies and the sector's broader strategic aims of internationalization and mobility of staff and students, suggesting the limits to piecemeal approaches to organizational policy and practices pertaining to sustainability. We conclude by discussing the role of technology and 'slow scholarship' as a means to reduce academic aeromobility.
ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper contributes to a growing body of literature highlighting the limitations of behaviour change and the emergence of a social practice approach to reframe responses to escalating resource consumption. Drawing insights from interviews with Australian households and workshops with behaviour change practitioners, we demonstrate how the 'Going Green' discourse, which focuses on targeting individuals to participate in 'easy' sustainability actions, overlooks the majority of consumption implicated in everyday practices. This leaves unchallenged the complex ways in which our lives are becoming more resource intensive. We argue for an ontological framing of social change underpinned by theories of social practice. Rather than considering policies, regulations and infrastructures involving urban form, housing, transport and infrastructure provision as 'external factors' separate from behaviour, practice theories accord them integral status in the constitution of social order and change. This represents a more challenging agenda for practitioners and governments in shifting and transforming everyday life.
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