Audley Genus

Permaculture is a growing but little researched phenomenon emphasising care for the environment, equity, fair treatment of people and working with—and not against—nature. It thus represents a potential alternative to business as usual, capable of addressing fundamental challenges posed by human‐made climate change. The paper examines a previously ignored site of entrepreneurship by taking a practice perspective, exploring connections between the practice and growth of permaculture and institutional entrepreneurship. It assesses practice‐related and institutional factors affecting the start‐up and operation of permaculture enterprises in the United Kingdom. The study maps and surveys UK Permaculture Association members who have started up their own business and reports on qualitative data from personal interviews with twenty of them. Data analysis employs NVivo software and involves thematic analysis pertaining to the practice, institutional biographies and institutional portfolios of permaculture entrepreneurs. The findings show the importance of permaculture activists' institutional biographies and institutional portfolios to the start‐up and operation of permaculture enterprises and for shaping permaculture‐related practice. The contribution of the paper lies in how it balances attention to individual agency with subfield‐specific, organisational field and macrosocial factors in understanding ‘beyond profit’ entrepreneurship.

In this article, we examine a change initiative designed to involve households in testing ways to transform two everyday practices ‒ heating and doing laundry. The research design included an examination of the challenges of changing practices either in a setting that fosters collective engagement or with individual households. Two different types of living labs were carried out simultaneously in eight European countries in Autumn–Winter 2018. We reflect on differences in results in terms of both changes in practices and the experiences of participating households that we argue can be at least partially attributed to householders’ engagement in different types of living labs. We discuss the implications of an individual-focused vs. community-oriented approach for change initiatives seeking to challenge social norms for sustainability transitions, concentrating in particular on differences in the nature of participants’ engagement and their willingness and ability to challenge routine practices. This is complemented by analytical reflections on the differences in design, interaction, and performance between the two types of living labs. We show that an explicit focus on collaborative engagement in living labs can produce results that reflect shared experiences, community support, challenging established norms, and collective commitment toward change.

The absence of economies of scale is a major barrier in use of renewable energy sources in small and dispersed off-grid remote communities. For example, in northern Canada, diesel is currently the main source of electricity and heat generation. Coordination of biomass supply chains could play a key role in improving the cost efficiency and reliability of bioenergy generation through bundled ordering and creation of storage hubs. In this study, a supply chain management model with multiple suppliers and multiple end-user communities is formulated. The proposed model enables us to analyse and compare the outcomes of adopting a cooperative coordination strategy (with a joint pay-off for communities) versus a non-cooperative coordination strategy (with individual payoffs for communities). Other peculiar attributes of the proposed model rest in the addressing of restricted ordering schedules and quantities (due to unavailability of pathways) by advocating nonlinear ordering and distribution costs (to incorporate quantity discounts) achieved through coordinated and/or collective inventories. A real biomass supply chain case study of three northernmost Nunavik communities in Quebec is considered to show the applicability of the model and provide insights for uptake of bioenergy sources in remote off-grid communities.

This title was first published in 2000. This text analyzes the problems of managing large-scale technology projects. It addresses the contrast between projects' hoped-for benefits and the optimism with which they are promoted, and the high human, economic or environmental costs of their operation. The book is multi-disciplinary in its approach and an integration of different levels of analysis. It contains case studies that are analyzed in terms of the literatures on decision theory, public administration and strategic and project managment.

In contrast with approaches which focus on behaviour relating to purchasing decisions and attitudes of consumers, research on social practices emphasises the analysis of what people routinely do and the elements of practice underpinning institutionalisation of collective conventions. This article contributes to this growing stream of literature by investigating social practices relevant to energy-efficient lighting in Denmark. It reports on data collected from ‘ethnographic interviews’ conducted in 16 Danish households and suggests that drawing on insights from institutional theory could enrich our understanding of social practices, for example, in relation to the emergence and embedding of new practices and shedding of ‘old’ ones. In addition to highlighting the elements of practice previously identified as integral to collective conventions and connections among different domains of practice, this article recognises the importance of phenomena usually examined in work emphasising institutional analysis. It suggests that policy interventions need to recognise various kinds of institutional rules and processes which confer legitimacy to emerging practices, to facilitate their sedimentation and contribute to realising environmentally sustainable systems and societies.