Towards a sustainable economy? Socio-technical transitions in the green building sector

Making the transition to a green economy is a major policy driver in the UK and other countries. Entrepreneurs are suggested as being at the forefront of this transition and as a driving force for sustainability. These “green entrepreneurs” may represent a new type of entrepreneurial behaviour combining economic, environmental and social aims. In this paper, we present empirical work conducted with green entrepreneurs in the UK green building sector. Buildings have significant impacts on the environment, both in terms of materials and post-construction energy demands. Drawing on sustainability transitions theory, we examine the role of green entrepreneurs in affecting change and suggest that green building niches are less consensual than previously theorised. In theorising green entrepreneurs, we also point to the need to consider them within wider networks of activity rather than as lone actors and the implications this has for policy

The green economy, sustainability transitions and transition regions : a case study of Boston

This paper is focused upon exploring the development of the green economy in particular locations, with the aim of identifying why some cities and regions have been successful in engendering green growth. To date we have little idea where the green economy is developing, nor much insight, beyond anecdotal evidence, into why certain cities and regions appear to be more successful than others in this regard. We position our analysis within the context of research on socio-technical transitions that has theorised the potential shift to a more sustainable economy. We review the literature on sustainability transitions and the development of the multi-level perspective encompassing niches, regimes and landscapes. However, most research into socio-technical transitions has not given adequate consideration to the influence of places and spatial scale in these transition processes, and we therefore critique the socio-technical transitions literature from a geographical perspective. In this paper we are interested in four key questions: what role does the enabling and facilitative state play in these cities and regions? What new institutional forms and governance structures are being developed? How do actors in particular cities and regions construct their green vision, and how do they encourage other actors to buy-in to this vision? How are links across levels and spatial scales developed to connect niches with the regime? We address these through a focus upon the Boston city region in the USA, drawing upon both primary and secondary research material. We utilize this case study example to re-examine and re-theorize work on sustainability transitions from a spatial perspective

Rethinking sociotechnical transitions and green entrepreneurship : the potential for transformative change in the green building sector

This paper explores the development of green entrepreneurship and its potential role in transformative change towards a green economy. It achieves this through a study of the green building sector in England and Wales, based on qualitative empirical data from fifty-five semistructured interviews with businesses in the green building sector and with support organisations, including banks, financial sources, and business advice and support. The paper both critiques and synthesises two bodies of literature-entrepreneurial research and sociotechnical transitions theories, specifically the multilevel perspective (MLP)-to better understand the role of green entrepreneurs in facilitating a shift towards a green economy. This analysis embeds green entrepreneurs in a wider system of actors, rather than reifying the lone entrepreneurial hero, in order to explore how green entrepreneurs facilitate sustainability transitions. The paper challenges the notion that green entrepreneurs are an unproblematic category. We discovered that individuals move between 'green' and 'conventional' business, evolving over time, such that this is a fluid and blurred, rather than static, state. Moreover, while the green economy and the green building sector are often referred to as coherent sectors, with agreed and consistent practices, our evidence suggests that they are far from agreed, that business models vary, and that there are significant contradictions within so-called green building practices. The paper contributes to the development of sociotechnical transitions theory and suggests that the MLP needs to incorporate complexity and multiplicity within niches, that niches may be inherently co nflictual rather than consensual, and that the concept of 'protection' for niches is problematic. © 2014 Pion and its Licensors

Rethinking green entrepreneurship - fluid narratives of the green economy

Green entrepreneurs have been seen as key drivers for a transition to a green economy. However, there has been limited in-depth qualitative empirical research with green entrepreneurs to date, focusing instead on typologies categorising certain ‘types’ of green entrepreneur. Moreover, the literature rarely situates such individual activities within broader concepts such as the green economy. In contrast, we suggest that current discourses of the green economy are important in contextualising the ways that green entrepreneurs make sense of themselves and their businesses. Green entrepreneurs are thus negotiating varying tensions between their business activities, environmental philosophies, and wider contexts at the intersection between the green economy and the mainstream economy. Drawing on evidence from 55 interviews, we explore the narratives employed by green entrepreneurs to situate themselves within/outwith the wider green economy – the recursive framing of mainstream and niche ‘green’ activities provides a sense of the tensions and politics at play in the development of the green economy. We thus offer a new and more dynamic view of the evolving nature of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a green entrepreneur, rather than relying on the fixed categories espoused in previous typologies. We conclude that it is important that policy makers recognise the complex and contentious nature of green entrepreneurship, and that it is essential to view the green economy as a diverse constellation of myriad actors rather than corporate reinventions of business as usual

Building a green economy? Sustainability transitions in the UK building sector

This paper explores the interest by policy makers to encourage and develop a green economy, with a particular focus on UK government attempts to engender a shift in the mainstream building and construction sector towards adopting green building methods and techniques. The building sector has been the focus of endeavours to engender a shift towards greener ways of working and building, due to its high contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and associated concerns over enhanced global warming and climate change. The paper outlines the recent development of national UK policy on green building as exemplified in legislation for the Code for Sustainable Homes and in Building Regulations. These have given rise to a particular set of responses to green building requirements that favour technological solutions that can readily be accommodated by the existing system. In critiquing these developments we draw upon socio-technical sustainability transitions research, one strand of which has focused on the ways in which niche developments can challenge and disrupt existing regimes of practice. We do this empirically through our research into the green building sector which has involved in-depth interviews with a range of actors from the UK green building sector, including architects, building companies, materials suppliers and policy makers. Respondents from within the green building niche are critical of current UK legislation, and argue that its narrow conceptualisation fails to adequately encourage, or recognise, what they would consider to be green building forms that will contribute to substantial reductions in carbon emissions, nor does it respect locally appropriate building methods

Institutionalizing alternative economic spaces? An interpretivist perspective on diverse economies

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems

Making meat collectivities : entanglements of geneticisation, integration and contestation in livestock breeding

To explore some of the contours of this meat ‘supply chain integration’ - ‘the phrase of the moment’ according to Farmers Weekly - this chapter draws on research conducted as part of a project exploring the effects of the emergence of particular types of genetic knowledge-practice in beef cattle and sheep breeding in the UK and their entanglement with ‘traditional’ ways of knowing and valuing livestock. The research is interested in the production and circulation of genetic knowledge-practices in agriculture, in examining how such knowledge-practices become established and gain legitimacy, how they become tangled up with visual and other traditional knowledge-practices, and in the effects of genetic knowledge-practices on how cattle and sheep are bred and managed and on human-nonhuman animal relationships in livestock farming. The research has increasingly led us to explore the process of ‘geneticisation’ beyond the farm gate, to look at how the establishment of particular genetic truths or ways of rendering ‘life itself’ (Franklin, 2000) are entangled with processes of restructuring and differentiation within UK food systems

Parent materials of Yellow-brown loams in the Waikato-Coromandel district.

The yellow-brown loams of the Waikato-Coromandel region are derived from weathered airfall volcanic materials. These materials may be either direct airfall deposits, or erosion products of these deposits, described as reworked ash in some publications. In the erosion products small amounts of other rocks may be included in the parent materials, and these additions may modify to a slight degree the chemical and physical properties of the soil as a yellow-brown loam. In larger amounts these additions result in the formation of intergrades to yellow-brown earths or gley soils

United Kingdom: Company Law - Corporate Groups

This comment seeks to acknowledge the reasoning behind the recent Court of Appeal decision in Chandler v Cape Plc. The purpose is to establish why this was not considered a situation where the "corporate veil" was pierced where the court found a duty of care was owed by a parent company to its subsidiary’s employees