Gill Seyfang

Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda

Abstract Innovation and community action are two important strands for sustainable development. Yet they have not hitherto been linked. Community action is a neglected, but potentially important, site of innovative activity. Bridging this divide offers a novel theoretical approach to the study of community-level action for sustainability. The opportunities presented by grassroots innovation are discussed, as are the challenges confronting activity at this level, and a new agenda for community-level sustainable development research and policy.

Growing Grassroots Innovations: Exploring the Role of Community-Based Initiatives in Governing Sustainable Energy Transitions:

The challenges of sustainable development (and climate change and peak oil, in particular) demand system-wide transformations in sociotechnical systems of provision. An academic literature around coevolutionary innovation for sustainability has recently emerged as an attempt to understand the dynamics and directions of such sociotechnical transformations, which are termed ‘sustainability transitions’. This literature has previously focused on market-based technological innovations. Here we apply it to a new context of civil-society-based social innovation and examine the role of community-based initiatives in a transition to a low-carbon sustainable economy in the UK. We present new empirical research from a study of the UKs Transition Towns movement (a ‘grassroots innovation’) and assess its attempts to grow and influence wider societal sociotechnical systems. By applying strategic niche management theory to this civil society context, we deliver theoretically informed practical recommendations for this movement to diffuse beyond its niche: to foster deeper engagement with resourceful regime actors; to manage expectations more realistically by delivering tangible opportunities for action and participation; and to embrace a community-based, action-oriented model of social change (in preference to a cognitive theory of behaviour change). Furthermore, our study indicates areas where theory can be refined to better explain the growth and broader impacts of grassroots innovations—namely, through a fuller appreciation of the importance of internal niche processes, by understanding the important role of identity and group formation, and by resolving how social practices change in grassroots innovations.

Governance for sustainability: towards a 'thick' analysis of environmental decisionmaking

Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society, and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity, and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which has become the dominant rhetorical device of environmental governance. We discuss the tendency for disciplinary research to focus on particular subsets of the four criteria, and argue that such a practice promotes solutions that do not acknowledge the dynamics of scale and the heterogeneity of institutional contexts. We advocate an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of environmental decisionmaking that seeks to identify legitimate and context-sensitive institutional solutions producing equitable, efficient, and effective outcomes. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by using it to examine decisions concerning contested nature conservation and multiple-use commons in the management of Hickling Broad in Norfolk in the United Kingdom. We conclude that interdisciplinary approaches enable the generalisation and transfer of lessons in a way that respects the specifics and context of the issue at hand.

Shopping for Sustainability: Can Sustainable Consumption Promote Ecological Citizenship?

Ecological citizenship is a justice-based account of how we should live, based upon private and public action to reduce the environmental impacts of our everyday lives on others. This paper examines ecological citizenship at perhaps its most mundane, yet its most ubiquitous and fundamental level: the choices and actions which individuals and households make on a daily basis, in the supermarket and on the high street. ‘Sustainable consumption’ has become a core policy objective of the new millennium in national and international arenas, and the paper critically evaluates the UK policy model of sustainable consumption as a tool for ecological citizenship. It first reviews the debate about sustainable consumption and describes two competing perspectives: one concerned with reform of the mainstream, and another more radical alternative. It then appraises the mainstream policy model of sustainable consumption in the light of ecological citizenship goals, and identifies a number of failures. Turning to the alternative perspective of sustainable consumption, a number of initiatives are discussed which are able to overcome the limitations of the mainstream model in enabling individual consumers to be good ecological citizens. Finally, the policy implications of this analysis are drawn out in order to nurture the practice of ecological citizenship.

New Hope or False Dawn?: Voluntary Codes of Conduct, Labour Regulation and Social Policy in a Globalizing World

This article maps the complex and fast-changing terrain of voluntary corporate codes of conduct, self-regulatory measures increasingly adopted by firms as a response to concerns about working conditions in global production chains. It considers their origins, their potentials and weaknesses, and finally their implications for the restructuring of social policy in a globalizing world. Despite there being considerably more rhetoric about codes than good practice, the processes through which codes have been developed has brought positive impacts in terms of highlighting the needs and voices of hitherto excluded groups of workers (women export workers, homeworkers, casual workers) in social policy and labour regulation debates.

Consuming Values and Contested Cultures: A Critical Analysis of the UK Strategy for Sustainable Consumption and Production

The term “sustainable consumption” is subject to many interpretations, from Agenda 21s hopeful assertion that governments should encourage less materialistic lifestyles based on new definitions of “wealth” and “prosperity”, to the view prevalent in international policy discourse that green and ethical consumerism will be sufficient to transform markets to produce continual and “clean” economic growth. These different perspectives are examined using a conceptual framework derived from Cultural Theory, to illustrate their fundamentally competing beliefs about the nature of the environment and society, and the meanings attached to consumption. Cultural Theory argues that societies should develop pluralistic policies to include all perspectives. Using this framework, the paper examines the UK strategy for sustainable consumption, and identifies a number of failings in current policy. These are that the UK strategy is strongly biased towards individualistic, market-based and neo-liberal policies, so it can only respond to a small part of the problem of unsustainable consumption. Policy recommendations include measures to strengthen the input from competing cultures, to realize the potential for more collective, egalitarian and significantly less materialistic consumption patterns.

Community Currencies: Small Change for a Green Economy

The author critically evaluates the impact and potential of a community currency—or local money system—known as the ‘local exchange trading scheme’ (LETS), to contribute to sustainable local development (SLD). Two distinct and contrasting models for sustainable development are described: a mainstream approach, focused on local regeneration [termed here the ‘local economic development’ (LED) approach]; and a radical ‘green’ or ‘new economics’ strategy (referred to as ‘sustainable local development’ or SLD). In the elaboration of these models the functions of community currencies within each perspective are outlined, and the basis for an evaluate framework is provided. Most previous analysis of LETS has used a broadly LED perspective; this paper focuses on an evaluation for SLD, as this has not previously been comprehensively done. For SLD, community currencies should enable people to: meet local needs through informal employment; revalue and redefine ‘work’; promote localisation and self-reliance; shift consumption patterns towards sharing, recycling, reuse, and reducing resource use; and build green social networks. Findings from a case-study LETS indicate that this community currency is successful in allowing participants to make small changes in their lifestyles, consumption, and employment patterns towards SLD, but there are limitations of size, scope, funding and management to be overcome before this could be achieved more effectively with LETS. However, following the LED-relevant prescriptions for upscaling and mainstreaming would undermine the qualities which align LETS with SLD perspective, and this highlights the importance of choosing appropriate evaluative frameworks, particularly when appraising sustainable-development initiatives.

Working Outside the Box: Community Currencies, Time Banks and Social Inclusion

A conceptual framework is developed for analysing UK social policy with respect to work, employment, inclusion and income. A range of possibilities for ‘productive engagement in work’ (PEW) outside the home are identified, ranging from formal employment, through informal employment, working for local community currencies, to unpaid voluntary work, each attracting particular policy responses, according to the hegemonic discourse of social exclusion, namely a liberal individualistic model which sees insertion into the labour market as the solution to exclusion. A new initiative is examined which is increasingly being adopted by local authorities in their efforts to tackle social exclusion and build social capital, namely ‘time banks’: a type of community currency which rewards people in time credits for the work they put into their neighbourhoods. Time banks are found to occupy a space in between what is already known about informal employment, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Schemes) and volunteering, raising a number of issues for policy makers and practitioners. While time banks may be promoted within the UK governments social inclusion remit as a means of increasing job-readiness through volunteering, they have wider and deeper implications. They represent a response to a radical social democratic understanding of social exclusion and hence exert a collective effort to redefine what is considered ‘valuable work’, and thus present an alternative to hegemonic paradigms of work and welfare; their greatest potential is as a radical tool for collective social capital building, resulting in more effective social, economic and political citizenship, and hence social inclusion. Policy recommendations are made to enable time banks to flourish and provide a powerful tool for achieving social inclusion objectives.

Growing sustainable consumption communities: The case of local organic food networks

Purpose – Sustainable consumption is increasingly on the policy menu, and local organic food has been widely advocated as a practical tool to make changes to conventional production and consumption systems. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of community‐based initiatives at achieving sustainable consumption objectives.Design/methodology/approach – A new multi‐criteria evaluation tool is developed, from New Economics theory, to assess the effectiveness of initiatives at achieving sustainable consumption. The key indicators are: localisation, reducing ecological footprints, community building, collective action and creating new socio‐economic institutions. This evaluation framework is applied to an organic producer cooperative in Norfolk, UK, using a mixed‐method approach comprising site visits, semi‐structured interviews and a customer survey.Findings – The initiative was effective at achieving sustainable consumption in each of the dimensions of the appraisal tool, but nevertheles...

Environmental mega-conferences—from Stockholm to Johannesburg and beyond

Abstract The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in August 2002 was the fourth environmental ‘mega’ conference since the first held in Stockholm in 1972. Its aim was to discuss how much progress has been made since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and plan further action for the future. This paper first reviews the history and evolution of the environmental ‘mega conferences’ and outlines six core functions which they seek to perform. These are: setting global agendas; facilitating ‘joined-up thinking’; endorsing common principles; providing global leadership; building institutional capacity; and legitimising global governance through inclusivity. Using this evaluative framework, the outcomes, achievements and disappointments of the Johannesburg summit are discussed, along with an evaluation of the future role of such mega-conferences. The paper concludes that environmental mega-conferences do serve an important function in contemporary environmental governance, even though they are not the panaceas that some had originally hoped they might be. In many ways WSSD was a wasted opportunity for progress—politicians lacked the will for adopt ambitious action plans, which frustrated and disappointed participants in the vibrant civil society summit which accompanied the official meeting. The sustainable development agendas have now been set and consolidated, and the task facing politicians is to implement the agreements. This will be achieved and monitored in different fora to the mega-conferences that had originally opened the debates. The task now is for the UN to incorporate the views of citizens groups and NGOs, and build on bottom-up activism, at the same time as top-down governmental decision-making.