Affecting future urban energy demand will play a significant role in mitigating climate emissions. While the literature has amply focused on the outputs of successful urban climate governance, there ...has been less focus on the organisational challenge that affecting energy demand will represent. By foregrounding the work practices of civil servants engaging with these issues, this study offers new insights into the possibilities and constraints of affecting energy demand. Inspired by work on social practice theory applied to organisations, it maps the tools, materialities and identity-related dynamics that affect civil servants' work. Empirically, the paper builds on interviews, document analysis and field notes taken in ten Nordic cities. The paper finds that the local agency for governing urban demand is contingent on navigating three tensions: (1) broadening the benefits of climate measures beyond carbon emissions, (2) challenging often politically attractive technologies, and the associated range of actors seen as relevant and (3) clarifying the role and responsibility of municipalities in relation to intervening in citizen's energy demand. By identifying the organisational tensions that civil servants face, the paper helps to understand the challenges encountered in advancing a local climate agenda, and the novel forms of agency that organisations can mobilise.
•Taking a social practice lens, this paper studies the tensions met by civil servants in realising demand-side interventions across 10 cities•It reveals three tensions across the tools, materialities and identity-related dynamics that affect civil servants’ work.•Amplifying local climate action will require the navigation of these three tensions in the work of civil servants•Ongoing demand reduction will require a widening out in terms of reflexivity, collaboration and political feasibility.
Although the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework to guide and inform research at the interface between science and policy, engaging in sustainability science is not a value-free ...process and implies making a number of choices. This is especially pertinent to early career researchers (ECRs) who are faced with the need to engage with the content and frame of the SDGs, while navigating critical engagement in knowledge production. Here, we propose a framework to help early career sustainability scholars navigate these tensions. We describe four archetypes at play in sustainability research and argue that these positions allow ECRs to reflexively navigate their roles and purposes in sustainability research.
While coproduction of knowledge is growing in popularity in social sciences, and especially climate change research, we still need to better understand how to coproduce climate knowledge. In this ...paper, we explore how collaborative climate hackathons coproduce local adaptation knowledge, and what this method reveals about local climate governance. The data derives from two collaborative climate hackathons, called Klimathons, that attracted 73 and 98 participants in Bergen, Norway. The participants were practitioners and decision-makers from local, regional, and national institutions as well as researchers from natural and social climate sciences. The collaborative group work revolved around the challenges and solutions of local adaptation planning and uncovered how a diversity of key actors understand the local adaptation work in Norway. These interventions revealed that there are significant disagreements and divergent understanding of relevant laws, regulations and responsibility between practitioners working within the same governance system. Though the cross-sectorial interaction does not dissolve these divergences, they allow actors to renegotiate boundaries between divergent knowledge communities. The Klimathons helped us navigate the complexity of local climate adaptation by shifting the focus to how different actors make sense of and work on adaptation and showing the intertwining and interdependence of potential drivers for adaptation.
•We explore how collaborative climate hackathons coproduce local adaptation knowledge, and what this method reveals about local climate adaptation governance•The collaborative hackathons helped us navigate the complexity of local climate adaptation governance•These cross-sectorial interventions allow actors to renegotiate boundaries between divergent knowledge communities, showing the intertwining and interdependence of potential adaptation drivers
This article presents the development of a theory-based framework for exploring the ways in which different teacher education institutions in Botswana have worked towards the infusion of education ...for sustainable development (ESD) in the curriculum and the practice of pre-service teacher education.The framework combines theory of change, a theory of education for sustainable human development and a theory of transformative learning.The objective of this paper is to understand how this theoretical framework can help the analysis and understanding of critical features of ESD pedagogy and projects.The research results obtained in the framework’s application highlight key elements enabling the successful implementation of ESD in two specific teacher education institutions, namely: the educators’ capacity to foster transformational pedagogies in the classroom, their capacity to strategically plan and implement their change projects, and the wider institutional and administrative context.
Understanding how cities develop climate plans is crucial to capture their potential to achieve ambitious climate goals. Previous literature has highlighted the role of external pressures or heroic ...actors in driving local changes. By highlighting the everyday practices of actors in urban climate planning, we reveal new sets of contradictions in climate governance. Drawing from social practice theory, this paper examines how contradictions were managed in the process of developing a new climate plan in Bergen, Norway. Through a variety of empirical sources, we explore the strategic value these offer, and the organisational work accomplished by the navigation of contradictions. We highlight three strategic benefits of negotiating contradictions: the legitimisation, expansion and signalling of climate work. In conclusion, the paper argues that considering practices of climate planning reveals novel forms of agency, namely the potential of mundane organisational processes and the pivotal role of civil servants in this work.
Meeting international climate targets will require deep and rapid shifts in urban demand patterns. While the literature has emphasized the role played by cities in the response to climate change, it ...remains unclear whether or how urban-level interventions actually affect possibilities for low-carbon living, and contribute to the re-configuration of everyday practices. In this paper, we use a social practice lens to understand how, and to what extent a range of Nordic cities target everyday demand patterns in the development of low-carbon policies. Contemporary demand-side approaches have been critiqued for their focus on the provision of low-carbon technologies and individual-level interventions. Instead, we argue that understanding how measures target and intervene in everyday practices provide a relevant lens for approaching the success of low-carbon interventions. Using an intervention-in practice-framework to understand urban interventions, we find that current measures rely heavily on non-committal measures in the domains of mobility and housing and forms of household self-governance. This paper concludes by discussing the policy implications of taking a practice view in developing climate interventions in urban setting, arguing that such perspective broadens the range of governance approaches adopted by cities to govern a reduction of urban emissions.
The present paper is a case study research that explores how different teacher education institutions in Botswana have worked towards the infusion of Education for Sustainable Development pedagogy ...and content in the curriculums of pre-service teachers. The main purpose of the research was to understand what elements promoted or inhibited the development of ESD change project by educational institutions. Combing the theory of change, the theory of human capability, the theory of social learning and the theory of transformative learning, a theory-based evaluative tool was developed and used to analysis data obtained through a variety of data sources. The results indicate that there are a number of crucial elements that enable a successful implementation of ESD in teacher education institutions in Botswana, namely: the educators’ ability to foster transformational pedagogies in the classroom, and their capacity to understand the different approaches that are inherent to the concept of ESD, their capacity to strategically plan for change and the wider institutional context for this implementation. Importantly, this research also provides some cues as to how the further implementation of ESD can be guided in teacher training.
ESSA Program at SWEDESD
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