About the Book

Putting Sustainability into Practice offers a robust and interdisciplinary understanding of contemporary consumption routines that challenges conventional approaches to social change premised on behavioral economics and social psychology. Empirical research is featured from eight different countries, using both qualitative and quantitative data to support its thesis.

Given the complex and systemic nature of contemporary ecological issues like climate change, a rapidly growing group of scholars is seeking new explanations of behavioral patterns and behavioral change. These new accounts clarify why patterns of consumption and waste continue to be unsustainable despite a wealth of information proving sustainability's importance. In particular, social practice theories offer a way of understanding how material consumption is built into the everyday work of belonging and shaping one's social life. Putting Sustainability into Practice contributes to the rich scholarship developed to date by applying social practice theories to case studies. These case studies are likely to be especially valuable to readers who are relatively new to the social practice perspective. The volume also includes research that advances social practice theories, moving the study of sustainable consumption into novel terrain such as sustainable finance, collective action, and social policy.

This book offers multiple empirical applications of social practice theories in sustainable consumption, advancing this research area in such a way that will attract academics to its findings. Those teaching classes in the environmental social sciences will find this introduction suitable for the classroom as well. It offers a rare account of the history of social practice theories and provides numerous case studies to which one can apply these approaches. Graduate students will also find this a useful guide to conducting empirical research on sustainable consumption and civic engagement from a social practices perspective.

Contributors: J. Backhaus, S. Barr, T. Bateman, F. Forno, M. Gismondi, C. Grasseni, M. Jaeger-Erben, D. Kasper, R. Kemp, J. Marois, J. Rückert-John, M. Sahakian, C. Schelly, S. Signori, D. Straith, H. Wieser

Table of Contents:
Contents: PART I 1. Social Practice Theories and Research on Sustainable Consumption Emily Huddart Kennedy, Maurie J. Cohen, and Naomi T. Krogman PART II SOCIAL MOBILIZATION AND SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION 2. Contextualizing Social Practices: Insights into Social Change Debbie Kasper 3. Environmental Civic Practices: Synthesizing Individual and Collective Sustainable Consumption Emily Huddart Kennedy and Tyler Bateman 4. Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups as ‘Citizenship Labs’ Francesca Forno, Cristina Grasseni, and Silvana Signori PART III COLLECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF HOUSEHOLD PRACTICES 5. Beyond Behavior Change: Social Practice Theory and the Search for Sustainable Mobility Stewart Barr 6. Disentangling Practices, Carriers, and Production-consumption Systems: A Mixed-method Study of (Sustainable) Food Consumption Julia Backhaus, Harald Wieser, and René Kemp 7. Getting Emotional: Historic and Current Changes in Food Consumption Practices Viewed Through the Lens of Cultural Theories Marlyne Sahakian PART IV SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL INNOVATION 8. Researching Transitions to Sustainable Consumption: A Practice Theory Approach to Studying Innovations in Consumption Melanie Jaeger-Erben and Jana Rückart-John 9. How Policy Frameworks Shape Environmental Practice: Three Cases of Alternative Dwelling Chelsea Schelly 10. ‘Unleashing Local Capital’: Scaling Cooperative Local Investing Practices Mike Gismondi, Juanita Marois, and Danica Straith PART V CONCLUDING REMARKS 11. Forging Further into Putting Sustainability into Practice Naomi T. Krogman, Maurie J. Cohen, and Emily Huddart Kennedy Index