Transitions in practice: climate change and everyday life

This climate change leadership fellowship addresses the need for new ways of framing problems of climate change, consumption and demand. To date, governments have sought to improve the efficiency with which contemporary 'standards' of everyday life are maintained. It is now clear that policy and governance actors have to go further and that systemic transitions in practice - in patterns of sociability and mobility, and of comfort, cleanliness, food provisioning and leisure - are also required. The fellowship aims to: 1. Develop understanding of how complex systems of practice and consumption emerge, persist and disappear - and with what consequence for the spatial and temporal ordering of daily life and the potential for mitigating or adapting to climate change. 2. Extend the range of social theoretical input to climate change policy by generating and encouraging new forms of academic and non-academic interaction. 3. Discover how social scientific analyses of systemic transitions in practice have shaped climate change policy and governance in other countries and contexts - and what lessons can be learned for the UK. Designed around a programme of research and writing, the fellowship involves running conferences, setting up a social-change climate-change working party and supervising two associated studentships.