The local level has gained prominence in climate policy and governance in recent
years as it is increasingly perceived as a privileged arena for policy experimentation
and social and institutional innovation. However, the success of local climate
governance in industrialized countries has been limited. One reason may be that local
communities focus too much on strategies of technology-oriented ecological modernization
and individual behavior change and too little on strategies that target unsustainable
social practices and their embeddedness in complex socioeconomic
patterns. In this paper we assess and compare the strategies of "low-carbon municipalities"
(top-down initiatives) and those of "intentional communities" (bottom-up initiatives).
We were interested to determine to what extent and in which ways each
community type intervenes in social practices to curb carbon emissions and to explore
the scope for further and deeper interventions on the local level. Using an analytical
framework based on social practice theory we identify characteristic patterns of intervention
for each community type. We find that low-carbon municipalities face difficulties
in transforming carbon-intensive social practices. While offering some
additional low-carbon choices, their ability to reduce carbon-intensive practices is
very limited. Their focus on efficiency and individual choice shows little transformative
potential. Intentional communities, by contrast, have more institutional and organizational
options to intervene in the web of social practices. Finally, we explore to
what extent low-carbon municipalities can learn from intentional communities and
propose strategies of hybridization for policy innovation to combine the strengths
of both models.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6326 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Hausknost, Daniel, Haas, Willi, Hielscher, Sabine, Schäfer, Martina, Leitner, Michaela, Kunze, Iris, Mandl, Sylvia |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/eet.1804, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6326/ |
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