Senja Laakso

Living Labs have emerged in the 2000s as experimental settings where diverse actors collectively produce knowledge on transforming aspects of everyday life, including everyday practices. However, Living Labs are often short term, and research on their lasting effects is limited. This article investigates how participation in Living Labs focusing on sustainable heating and laundry practices contributed to the development of household resilience, which helped participants navigate two major disruptions: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022–3 energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on Schatzki’s conceptualization of practices, the article conceptualizes household energy resilience as practice and exemplifies how it is shaped by prior learning, in this case through experimentation. Using data from follow-up studies conducted three years later in Finland and the Netherlands with participants from the Living Labs that took place in 2018, it examines long-lasting effects of experiments with everyday practices on household energy consumption. Findings show that earlier experimentation had helped building household energy resilience in two ways: many changes in energy-related practices were sustained, as participants had learned to meet the teleoaffective structures of practices in alternative ways (resilience as practice), while some practices had never changed (resilient practices).

To mitigate environmental crises, affluent societies must both reduce the volume of consumption and change consumption patterns. Consequently, there is growing academic interest in the concept of sufficiency as ‘enoughness’ and sustainable wellbeing. However, recent research has shown that sufficiency still receives very limited attention for example in policy making. The media serves both as a platform for negotiating meanings of consumption among various actors and as an actor itself, shaping representations of normality. This article examines how the Finnish news media reproduces or challenges consumption practices in its sufficiency discourse and how this discourse has evolved during the 2000s. The data consists of a sample of media items on consumption from the years 2000–02, 2010–12 and 2020–22, drawn from two national news media outlets: Helsingin Sanomat and Yle. The results show that the discourse has shifted towards portraying sufficiency practices as more rational and acceptable while increasingly problematising overconsumption. However, the discourse tends to emphasise lifestyle changes and business opportunities, with relatively few policy solutions mentioned. Hence, despite the growing prominence of positive connotations such as wellbeing and recognition of the systemic nature of overconsumption, achieving sufficiency ultimately remains framed as an individual responsibility.

Yhteiskuntien kehittyminen kestäviksi edellyttää radikaalia muutosta kulutustottumuksissa. Tämä tarkoittaa muun muassa merkittävää kulutuksen hiilijalanjäljen pienentämistä ja ylikulutuksen absoluuttista vähentämistä, mitä voidaan tarkastella kohtuullisuuden käsitteen kautta. Tarvittavien muutosten toteuttaminen vaatii poliittista ohjausta. Asumisen energiankäyttö on merkittävä hiilidioksidipäästöjen aiheuttaja, mutta aiemmat tutkimukset ovat osoittaneet, että kohtuullisuuden näkökulma on jäänyt energiatehokkuuteen ja uusiutuviin energialähteisiin liittyvien keinojen varjoon. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastelemme suomalaisten kulutus- ja kestävyystutkimuksen asiantuntijoiden näkemyksiä kestävän kulutuksen ohjauskeinovalikoimasta. Aineisto on kerätty vuonna 2022 järjestetyn keskustelevan Delfoi-prosessin tuloksena. Asiantuntijoita pyydettiin arvioimaan ja ehdottamaan sellaisia poliittisia ohjauskeinoja, joiden avulla Suomen kaikki kulutusperusteiset päästöt vähenisivät puolella vuoteen 2035 mennessä vuoden 2016 tasoon verrattuna. Tutkimuksemme osoittaa, että asumisen energiankulutukseen liittyvät, vahvasti kohtuullisuuteen ohjaavat toimet olivat asiantuntijoiden ehdottamassa ohjauskeinokokonaisuudessa selvässä vähemmistössä. Vaikuttavimmat asumiseen kohdistuvat kohtuustoimet ovat poikkileikkaavia taloudellisia ohjauskeinoja. Niiden toteutettavuus ja hyväksyttävyys herättävät kuitenkin eniten epävarmuutta, kun taas heikommin kohtuuteen ohjaavat toimenpiteet ovat pääosin jo vakiintuneita ja hyväksyttyjä käytäntöjä.

Social practice theories have become increasingly prominent in sustainability transitions research. By drawing attention to everyday life and social dynamics as key issues in sustainability transitions alongside technologies, infrastructures, and policies, practice theories provide valuable contributions to transition research, governance, and intervention design. Instead of focusing solely on individual behaviours or structures, they view practices – collective patterns of human activity – as the central unit of analysis, emerging from and at the same time shaping (infra)structures and behaviours. Therefore, practice theories can be fruitfully utilised as an alternative or complementary perspective on sustainability transition frameworks to identify, explain and address the social dynamics of change. In this chapter, we show how social practice theories can be used to study – as well as to bring about – innovations and disruptions for sustainability transitions. We start by providing a concise overview of what practices are and how they change. We also showcase an example of a practice theory-inspired change initiative as well as discuss the main differences, similarities, and synergies of social practice theories and the multi-level perspective of socio-technical transitions. We end with outlining some of the on-going debates and further research needs.

"Welfare within planetary boundaries in the Nordics: can sufficiency pave the path forward for sustainable policy and practice?" published on 23 Aug 2024 by Bristol University Press.

There is a wide evidence base on various interventions to change energy behaviours in households, but limited evidence on their long-term effects. It is argued that interventions in individual behaviours are subject to attrition over time following the withdrawal of the intervention. Evaluation of these arguments is difficult since the conditions and composition of households change over time, making it hard to isolate the effects of a behavioural intervention several years later. Social practice theory argues for interventions that do not target individual attitudes or behaviours but focus instead on household practices (such as laundering and heating homes), and the underlying notions of cleanliness and comfort that are the causes of energy use in households. In contrast to behaviours, practices are also seen as socially shared, bundled with other practices, and embedded in social structures and processes. Practices are durable entities that persist over time; true practice change would hence entail durable intervention impacts. Our paper qualitatively investigates the long-term effects (2018–2023) of a practice-based living lab intervention that aimed to influence laundry and heating practices in Finnish households. We compare how the new or changed practices of 21 households, learned during the intervention, have persisted through societal changes (i.e., the Covid pandemic and the energy crisis), and whether these new or changed practices helped households to deal better with these crises. In this way, we contribute to, and also reframe, the problem of evaluating long-term effects, and critically consider the persistence of small-scale interventions in practices.

The energy crisis that began in late 2021 and escalated after the war in Ukraine in early 2022 was seen as a disruption accelerating the energy transition in Europe. It forced households to save energy and change their patterns of energy use in a struggle to cut dependency on Russian energy, and in public discussions, various kinds of agency were required from and allocated to households. In this article, we analyze a total of 220 articles on energy use published in the main Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, during the energy crisis between 1 November 2021 and 31 October 2022. We investigate how household agency driven by the energy crisis is framed in the media by analyzing the variety of roles assigned to households and the framings of the agency attached to those roles in relation to mitigating the energy crisis. The analysis provides insights into how households are embedded within the energy system and whether and how they are expected to facilitate the energy transition; moreover, the article contributes to a better conceptualization of the understudied roles and agency of households in transitions.