Index
Beyond behaviour change
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Download the Beyond Behaviour Change research group flyer (PDF 546 KB).
About
The Beyond Behaviour Change (Beyond BC) research group is exploring opportunities to facilitate change that move beyond the current focus on individual resource consumption and behaviour to consider why and how people consume within a broader social, cultural, technical and institutional context. Drawing on theories of 'social practices', the group is engaged in projects and activities that seek to identify avenues for change that add new dimensions (and establish alternatives) to familiar economic and psychological approaches dominating the resource and environmental sectors, such as rational action, consumer choice, information provision, demand management and market mechanisms.
The group includes a multi-disciplinary research team of designers, planners, social scientists and environmental managers working at the Centre for Design. Members have broad interests in areas of social and environmental change including energy consumption, climate change mitigation and adaptation, water consumption, transport planning, food provision, and health.
Group members engage in a range of activities including applied and collaborative research projects, supervision of Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates, facilitation of an inter-disciplinary and inter-university Beyond BC reading group, and the hosting of occasional workshops and events.
Aim
The Beyond BC research group encompasses a range of projects and initiatives which aim to:
- Explore the practical and real world implications and applications of social practice theory and other related theories of socio-technical change.
- Engage with government agencies and departments, other academic institutions and research centres, NGOs, related resource sectors (energy, water, transport), and community groups who are delivering or developing behaviour change or demand management programs and policies.
- Make the key concepts of practice theory accessible and usable for the above-mentioned organisations and institutions.
- Seek and strengthen opportunities to pursue collaborative research opportunities with academic and external partners on applying practice theory in new or existing policies and programs.
- Contribute to the academic community on the empirical and real world applications of practice theory through publications, presentations and related material.
- Draw on practice theory to inform the design of our built world (from products, architecture and urban planning).
Approach
Social practices are responsible for most, if not all consumption, from getting up in the morning, taking a shower and traveling to work, right through to preparing an evening meal and going to sleep. While there is no unifying definition of a social practice, it can be loosely described as an interwoven activity in a social domain (Schatzki 1999), such as walking, cycling, showering, laundering, eating or cooking.
The key distinction between behaviour change and social practice theory is the shifting emphasis from individual people and their consumption, to social practices and their ‘carriers’. A social practice is made up of a number of ‘elements’ including common understandings about what we ought to do, practical knowledge about how we do it, rules about what we must or have to do, and material infrastructures such as technologies and systems of provision which enable the practice (see Figure 1)
Importantly, a social practices approach does not imply a fundamental rejection of all behaviour change (and demand management) approaches, rather it broadens out the possibilities (and highlights the limitations) of existing approaches in ways which offer new avenues for change.
Download the 'Conceptualising everyday practices' working paper (PDF 21P 200KB) for an example of how the Carbon Neutral Communities project team applied this approach in their research.
Figure 1: Elements of a practice
Adapted from Strengers 2009, p.40
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