International Workshop and Journal Special Issue

This international workshop will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on household innovation and agency in sustainability transitions. It will be hosted by Monash University at its Prato campus in Italy, October 26-28, 2022.

This special issue will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on household innovation and agency in sustainability transitions. Households are sites of substantial resource use and are routinely targeted as subjects of sustainability-oriented policies or as consumers of more sustainable products and services. Households are also sites of tinkering and innovation, where new technologies, services, behaviours, practices, skills, knowledge and norms are developed, trialled, embedded, reconfigured and transformed. Despite advances in relevant debates on the economics of household innovation, the geography of sustainable innovation and transitions, the consumption-side of socio-technical systems and user-led innovation, the literature on sustainability transitions overall remains surprisingly muted about households as a site, scale, and social setting of sustainability transitions.

This special issue seeks to move beyond a narrow framing that reduces households to ‘consumers’, ‘innovators’ or ‘users’. Such framing misses the multiplicity of influences of everyday life, labour and cross-generational factors in households, innovation and agency in sustainability transitions. The special issue will also deliberately position household innovation and agency in the context of sustainability ambitions and the ways in which household innovation and agency are enabled or constrained by system-level transition dynamics and path-dependencies. As such the special issue will unpack the household as a dynamic social unit and material setting in the context of multiple scales and other social groups. This will help to improve analytical understanding and develop novel conceptualisations of the complex interplay between the inner workings of households and system-level approaches to achieve sustainability transitions. Contributions from the Global South are very much welcomed.