Local Sustainable Energy Projects as part of Wider System Change; The Story of Local Projects

Climate change as a result of human activity is widely accepted around the world as one of the key threats of our age; caused by and leading to a number of social, environmental and economic factors. Many national and international laws now oblige the reduction of carbon emissions. Given that just under a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions are from energy use in the residential sector, much attention in the UK has been focused on domestic energy efficiency refurbishment and behaviour change projects. However, energy users are often ‘locked-in’ to certain energy systems and practices as part of national sociotechnical regimes. Previous studies, however, have not explored what happens in individual, localised projects as part of system transition to sustainable energy use. This research explores this; looking at two Birmingham case studies. Each installed energy efficiency and microgeneration technologies and attempted behaviour change. In both projects a multitude of causative beliefs were found relating to both the problems that each project was trying to solve the solutions to those problems, hence the nature of success. Success was interpreted differently by different organisers, depending on their own priorities in the complex interconnected issues of energy and social sustainability in a diverse and often deprived city. The research demonstrates that in many projects there are positive outcomes, although not always the one originally hoped for. None of these successes are explicitly to do with the transition of the energy sociotechnical regime, and yet the projects do contribute to such a transition. Successful projects are more likely to be built upon, allowing systemic change over a long time. Local projects can act as a ‘step’ in this process.