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19th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production – Circular Europe for Sustainability: Design, Production and Consumption

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Energy Living Labs for heating and laundry across eight European countries: challenging everyday practices

This paper presents the empirical findings of the European project, ENERGISE (H2020), focused on the main research question: In what way can Energy Living Labs contribute to changes in laundry and heating practices in the home? While most initiatives aimed at reducing or improving energy in the home have been dominated by efforts to improve individual behaviour or introduce more efficient technologies (Jensen et al 2018), ENERGISE takes as a starting point the importance of engaging everyday people in a deliberative process towards challenging collective conventions and designing for ruptures in everyday routines. Over several weeks in November and December 2018 and with a focus on laundry and heating, consortium partners rolled out living labs which involved 300 households in eight countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis are combined to explain how and in what way changes in everyday practices occurred, and what changes took place in relation to energy reductions and savings. We begin by discussing our conceptual framework around social practice theory, then briefly introduce the research sites and living lab design. We then present key findings to uncover and discuss how changes occur in relation to practices, with an emphasis on the significance of challenging collective conventions, and on the potential for such initiatives to achieve sufficiency – or absolute reductions in energy usage combined with changes to everyday practices.

Marlyne Sahakian
University of Geneva
Switzerland

Grégoire Wallenborn
University of Geneva
Switzerland

Laurence Godin
University of Geneva
Switzerland

Eva Heiskanen
University of Helsinki
Finland

Senja Laakso
University of Helsinki
Finland

Julia Backhaus
Maastricht University
Netherlands

Véronique Vasser
Maastricht University
Netherlands

Christian Scholl
Maastricht University
Netherlands

Henrike Rau
University of Munich
Germany

Eoin Grealis
University of Munich
Germany

Annika-Kathrin Musch
University of Munich
Germany

Ludwig Maximilians
University of Munich
Germany

Frances Fahy
NUI Galway
Ireland

Gary Goggins
NUI Galway
Ireland

Eimear Heaslip
NUI Galway
Ireland

Edina Vadovics
Green Dependent Institute
Hungary

Audley T Genus
Kingston University
United Kingdom

Marfuga Iskandarova
Kingston University
United Kingdom

Charlotte Louise Jensen
Aalborg University
Denmark

Freja Friis
Aalborg University
Denmark

 


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