Encountering energy strategies and plans with the social context of household practice

Encountering energy strategies and plans with the social context of household practices Governments and utility companies have developed a great deal of strategies and plans on how to cope with energy saving in households, since this represents a major issue for climate change remediation. Many of these governance initiatives tend to re-produce the idea of technical potentials, and have difficulties in coping with the challenge of establishing a social context for embedding energy saving actions in local households.

Our aim in this paper is to explore how energy strategies and plans may be anchored in the social context of local households. This is especially relevant in an urban planning context, since we are experiencing a wave of new types of initiatives in Denmark, where local authorities launch and facilitate local processes of transition towards energy savings.

These initiatives are characterized by explicitly focusing on establishing a social context for embedding energy saving actions in local households; thus producing new planning practices that appreciate the social challenge, rather than re-producing the idea of technology transfer. These cases of local planning initiatives provide an interesting context to explore successful intersections between energy planning practices and household practices.

The theoretical contribution of the paper is to bridge between household and energy planning practices. This bridging is based on the conceptualisation of the house as the stage of household practices (the social context), on the one hand, and the stage of planning and carrying out energy saving action initiatives (strategies and plans), on the other hand.

The paper explores how these practices encounter in exemplary local processes of learning-by-trying to implement energy saving solutions in households, and provides important clues about the potentiality to anchor energy strategies and plans in the social context of local households.