ABSTRACT

Climate change is widely agreed to be one the greatest challenges facing society today. Mitigating and adapting to it is certain to require new ways of living. Thus far efforts to promote less resource-intensive habits and routines have centred on typically limited understandings of individual agency, choice and change. This book shows how much more the social sciences have to offer.

The contributors to Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change come from different disciplines – sociology, geography, economics and philosophy – but are alike in taking social theories of practice as a common point of reference. This volume explores questions which arise from this distinctive and fresh approach:

  • how do practices and material elements circulate and intersect?
  • how do complex infrastructures and systems form and break apart?
  • how does the reproduction of social practice sustain related patterns of inequality and injustice?

This collection shows how social theories of practice can help us understand what societal transitions towards sustainability might involve, and how they might be achieved. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, environmental studies, geography, philosophy and economics, and to policy makers and advisors working in this field.

chapter |13 pages

Sustainable practices

Social Theory and Climate Change

part |32 pages

How Are Practices Defined and How Do They Change?

chapter |16 pages

The Edge of Change

On the Emergence, Persistence, and Dissolution of Practices

part |39 pages

The Materials of Practice

chapter |20 pages

Transitions in the Wrong Direction?

Digital Technologies and Daily Life

part |27 pages

Sharing and Circulation

chapter |14 pages

Practices, Movement and Circulation

Implications for Sustainability

chapter |11 pages

Sharing Conventions

Communities of Practice and Thermal Comfort

part |32 pages

Sustainability, Inequality and Power

chapter |14 pages

Power, Sustainability and Well Being

An outsider's view

chapter |16 pages

Inequality, Sustainability and Capability

Locating Justice in Social Practice