The challenge of achieving low-carbon communities cannot be underestimated. While government policies set ambitious targets for carbon-reduction over the next 40 years, there remains an urgent need for tools and initiatives to deliver these reductions through behaviour-change among individuals,...

The challenges of sustainable development (and climate change and peak oil in particular) demand system-wide transformations in socio-technical systems of provision. An academic literature around co-evolutionary innovation for sustainability has recently emerged to attempt to understand the...

The UK's energy transition (to a sustainable, low-carbon development path) may turn out to be highly dependant on the engendering and embedding of new types of social practice as well as on the widespread uptake of new low-carbon technologies. We argue that social change and social movements may...

Sustainable consumption demands radical changes to the socio-economic and socio-technical systems of provision in society, in order to realign development goals towards quality of life rather than material consumption. Complementary currencies (CCs - parallel media of exchange which run...

Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective. This paper applies 'new economics' theory to evaluate a local organic food initiative as a tool for 'alternative' sustainable consumption, which is here understood to mean redefining social infrastructure and...

Sustainable consumption is increasingly on the policy menu, and local organic food provision has been widely advocated as a practical means of making the desired changes to conventional production and consumption systems. This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of a local organic food...

Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new policy objective, requiring consumers to enact preferences for sustainability through the marketplace. But there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour which individuals can make within social institutions, and current policies do...

In recent years organically-grown produce for local markets has become more popular with consumers, and re-localising food chains has been put forward as a strategy for sustainable consumption due to the apparent benefits to local economies, communities, and environments. Notions of 'sustainable...

Ecological Citizenship is a potentially ethic-based motivation for changing behaviour towards more sustainable lifestyles. It describes citizenship as activity taken in the private as well as public sphere, and with regard to a common humanity transcending the boundaries of nation states. This...

The 'social economy' has become a buzz-word in UK politics over the last decade as the 'third sector' is now seen as a source of social inclusion, enterprise, training and employment by all political parties, and a site of alternative economic and social relations, by activists and academics....