Mainstreaming best practices in energy demand

It is becoming increasingly clear that we need an integrated approach to understanding and encouraging transitions towards a sustainable energy system. Current overall unsustainable ‘practices’ are locked into cultural, material, institutional and infrastructural settings. This limits the scope for individual choice and action. Even when actions are taken on individual or project level, they often remain stand-alone niche experiments and little further diffusion takes place. This paper addresses this problem by investigating how new more sustainable practices in the field of energy demand at the micro level can become mainstream and how energy demand side management projects can encourage this. We first discuss how a multilevel systems approach and practice theory may be fruitfully combined to address the problem of mainstreaming. Second, we analyse four empirical cases of energy demand side management. We explore efforts at diffusing these sustainable energy practices, the encountered challenges, employed solutions and achieved outcomes with the goal of learning about opportunities to mainstream best practices in the field of energy demand. The analysis reveals that the case that involved the most radical innovation faced the highest resistance to mainstreaming from the incumbent system. The more incremental initiatives were more successful at diffusing, but had rather modest outcomes in terms of environmental and efficiency gains. An important finding is that in order to shift everyday practices to a more sustainable direction, an understanding of possibilities to trigger changes in social norms is needed. When these changes are quite invasive, more time for negotiation and discussion might be needed before they become regarded as legitimate. Furthermore, connecting supply and demand (instead of merely addressing the demand side) can be crucial in mainstreaming sustainable energy practices. Although lessons learned from the cases do not offer clear-cut ‘do’s and don’ts’ for future efforts, they do highlight important issues for mainstreaming sustainable practices. These issues can sometimes be addressed within the scope of a single energy demand side project, but often policy has an important facilitating role to play in making sustainable energy practices legitimate and mainstream

Policies tackling the “web of constraints” on resource-efficient practices: the case of mobility

In practice, environmental policy is only moving slowly from a focus on promoting environmental technologies to a focus on greening socio-technical systems. Policy measures to stimulate resource efficiency (RE) typically address the national, sectoral, or company level. This article shows how an analysis addressing practices that citizens engage in, such as eating or mobility, can contribute to more effective RE policy. It is instrumental to highlight policy contradictions in the current mix of policies and offer suggestions for stronger policy synergies. We offer a conceptual and empirical analysis based on the results of a large-scale survey (1200+ respondents) in three countries (Austria, Hungary, and The Netherlands), focusing on one of the most resource intensive consumption domains: mobility. We apply a framework that includes the social context of resource consumption, addressing how practices that citizens engage in are shaped by both “collective” physical infrastructures, the business models of products, social meanings, and regulatory incentives, and also by “individual” knowledge and skills, values, and financial capabilities. Our “web of constraints” perspective on RE highlights the interrelatedness of individual actor and collective factors. It is instrumental for an integrative policy discussion, addressing a range of factors hindering RE, anticipating policy contradictions, to capitalize on synergies

Realizing the Basic Income:Competing Claims to Expertise in Transformative Social Innovation

Current social innovation initiatives towards societal transformations bring forward new ways of doing and organizing, but new ways of knowing as well. Their efforts towards realizing those are important sites for the investigation of contemporary tensions of expertise. The promotion of new, transformative ways of knowing typically involves a large bandwidth of claims to expertise. The attendant contestation is unfolded through the exemplar case of the Basic Income in which the historically evolved forms of academic political advocacy are increasingly accompanied by a new wave of activism. Crowd-funding initiatives, internet activists, citizen labs, petitions and referenda seek to realize the BI through different claims to expertise than previous attempts. Observing both the tensions between diverse claims to expertise and the overall co-production process through which the Basic Income is realized, this contribution concludes with reflections on the politics of expertise involved in transformative social innovation

Designing Real-World Laboratories for the Reduction of Residential Energy Use : Articulating Theories of Change

Reducing residential energy use and carbon dioxide emissions is a policy concern across Europe. One of the approaches to address this problem, real-world laboratories (RwLs), has recently gained prominence as a means to generate both sustainability change and social knowledge. Yet RwLs are context-bound, and transferability is an issue for scaling up change. Drawing on Realistic Evaluation (RE) and Theories of Change (ToC), this paper analyses researchers’ and practitioners’ views on the role of contexts and change mechanisms in the outcomes of interventions targeting residential energy use. The results show that extracting the underlying logic of RwL designs could help to identify where and when these designs are likely to be transferrable. This contribution has implications for the design of future RwLs, given that RwLs have until now rarely articulated their ToC.Peer reviewe

Risk Stratification, Measurable Residual Disease, and Outcomes of AML Patients with a Trisomy 8 Undergoing Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation

Background: For most patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) harboring a trisomy 8 an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a suitable and recommended consolidation therapy. However, comparative outcome analyses between patients with and without trisomy 8 undergoing allogeneic HSCT have not been performed so far. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed clinical features, outcomes, and measurable residual disease (MRD) of 659 AML (12%, n = 81, with a trisomy 8) patients subjected to allogeneic HSCT as a consolidation therapy. Results: The presence of a trisomy 8 associated with a trend for higher age at diagnosis, AML of secondary origin, lower white blood cell counts at diagnosis, worse ELN2017 genetic risk, wild-type NPM1, and mutated IDH1/2 and JAK2. Outcomes after allogeneic HSCT in the entire cohort did not differ between patients with a sole trisomy 8, trisomy 8 with additional cytogenetic aberrations or without a trisomy 8. A trisomy 8 did not affect outcomes within the three ELN2017 risk groups. In accordance with findings in unselected patient cohorts, persistent MRD at allogeneic HSCT in patients with a trisomy 8 identified individuals with a higher risk of relapse following allogeneic HSCT. Conclusions: Outcomes of trisomy 8 patients after allogeneic HSCT did not compare unfavorably to that of other AML patients following allogeneic HSCT. Rather than the presence or absence of a trisomy 8, additional genetic aberrations and MRD at HSCT define outcome differences and aid in informed treatment decisions

Challenging Practices : Experiences from community and individual living lab approaches

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