Social Practice Theories and Sustainability Transitions Studies

Social practice theories have become increasingly prominent in sustainability transitions research. By drawing attention to everyday life and social dynamics as key issues in sustainability transitions alongside technologies, infrastructures, and policies, practice theories provide valuable contributions to transition research, governance, and intervention design. Instead of focusing solely on individual behaviours or structures, they view practices – collective patterns of human activity – as the central unit of analysis, emerging from and at the same time shaping (infra)structures and behaviours. Therefore, practice theories can be fruitfully utilised as an alternative or complementary perspective on sustainability transition frameworks to identify, explain and address the social dynamics of change. In this chapter, we show how social practice theories can be used to study – as well as to bring about – innovations and disruptions for sustainability transitions. We start by providing a concise overview of what practices are and how they change. We also showcase an example of a practice theory-inspired change initiative as well as discuss the main differences, similarities, and synergies of social practice theories and the multi-level perspective of socio-technical transitions. We end with outlining some of the on-going debates and further research needs.