Strategic engagements with resistance against energy-efficient devices - Exploring the hidden politics of comfort desires in housing

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Abstract

In an attempt to win the hearts and minds of urban stakeholders, governing practices for climate protection have shifted toward deployment of new forms of governance, such as inducing and seducing (Bulkeley and Kern 2006). Urban governments are engaging in strategic efforts to mobilize urban stakeholders, either by inducing them to change their practices by applying force and pressure (e.g. through regulation), or by seducing them to do so by being attentive to what drives and motivates them. An increasing amount of urban governments engage in such strategic efforts as a response to resource pressures in cities (Hodsen and Marvin 2011). The proposed cultural politics perspective suggested in this book provides new insight into the deployment of these new forms of governance, which urban governments engage in as a means to handle resistance against climate protection initiatives. An important focus in climate protection is the development of more energy-efficient housing. Local policy makers increasingly engage in inducing the construction of higher-energy-performance houses and seducing local stakeholders to buy into them. Challenging stakeholders through governance approaches such as local development projects, local policy makers seek to engage more directly with high-carbon desires related to the home. But resistance then comes to the fore: visions of high-energy-performance housing clash with desires and devices that have been established in the household over time. An energy/performance gap thus prevails, even though it is now recognized that the energy cost of maintaining standardized comfort conditions in buildings is ultimately unsustainable (Shove 1998). Important energy is consumed in the high-carbon practices necessary to fulfill desires for comfort in the home. Such desires represent what Shove (2003) terms normal expectations, since they reflect the inconspicuous routines and habits of conventions that have evolved collectively over time. Such normal expectations are not always addressed in consumer-oriented environmental policies, and, as one experience from Denmark illustrates, the result is that the increase in energy efficiency in housing on the basis of such policies has to some extent been outweighed by rising standards for housing comfort, size and equipment in buildings (Christensen et al. 2007). This points to an important blind spot in climate protection policies: we need to better understand the dynamics of the resistance nurtured by normal expectations such as the desire for comfort.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelTowards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent
Antal sider15
ForlagCambridge University Press
Publikationsdato1 jan. 2016
Sider127-141
ISBN (Trykt)9781107166271
ISBN (Elektronisk)9781316694473
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 1 jan. 2016

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