6.1 Introduction

Social practice theories (SPT) 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 (e.g. Sovacool et al. Reference Sovacool, Hess and Cantoni2021), SPT provide valuable contributions to transition research and practice. Notably, SPT neither focus on individual behaviour nor on structures. Instead, they view practices as central and the most crucial unit of analysis, emerging from and at the same time shaping (structures and infrastructures) structures and behaviours. SPT therefore can be, and already are, fruitfully utilised as an alternative and to some extent complementary perspective on sustainability transition models, such as the Multi-level perspective (MLP), to identify, explain and address the social dynamics of change.

In this chapter, we will show how SPT can be used to study – as well as to bring about – innovations (Backhaus et al. Reference Backhaus, Genus and Lorek2018) and disruptions (Kivimaa et al. Reference Kivimaa, Laakso, Lonkila and Kaljonen2021) in sustainability transitions. We start by providing a concise overview of SPT, of what practices are and how they change. After that, we showcase an example of an SPT-inspired change initiative and discuss the main differences, similarities and synergies of SPT and MLP. We end with outlining some of the ongoing debates and further research needs.

6.2 What Are Social Practice Theories?

SPT build on many scholarly traditions, including sociology, science and technology studies, anthropology and pragmatism; as well as on several theories such as structuration theory and actor-network theory and on methodologies like phenomenology and ethnomethodology (see, e.g. Shove et al. Reference Shove, Pantzar and Watson2012; see also Table 6.1). The historical development of SPT can be divided into three phases, starting from works of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault, among others, who during the 1970s and 80s sought to address and resolve the agency-structure dilemma (Warde Reference Warde2014). Although the conceptual roots of SPT thus stretch further into history, the works by the second phase theorists like Andreas Reckwitz (Reference Reckwitz2002), Theodore Schatzki (Reference Schatzki2002), Elizabeth Shove (Reference Shove2003) and Alan Warde (Reference Warde2005), explored the dynamics of practices, thereby paving the way for SPT to become one of the main theoretical approaches in numerous social science research fields from consumption to organisational studies (and many other fields, see e.g. Nicolini Reference Nicolini2013; Shove Reference Shove2023). This so-called ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social theory (Schatzki et al. Reference Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny2001) inspired the third phase, characterised by applications of the theory in diverse empirical settings, including research and policy programmes directed at sustainability transitions. As this theoretical and empirical variety suggests, there is no one grand or synthetic version of SPT, but rather different ways of theorising social practices with strong ‘family resemblances’ (see Nicolini Reference Nicolini2012: 9).

A much-used definition characterises a social practice as ‘a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described, and the world is understood’ (Reckwitz Reference Reckwitz2002: 250). Furthermore, a practice ‘consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (Reckwitz Reference Reckwitz2002: 249). Practices are hence combinations of components called elements, often divided into materials, meanings and competences (Shove et al. Reference Shove, Pantzar and Watson2012). Materials include things, technologies, tangible physical entities, the human body and other material objects. Meanings include ideas, symbolism, aspirations and other cognitive dimensions. Competences include skills, habits, knowledge and technique. These elements are brought together in the performance of practices, such as heating the home, cooking, teaching, urban planning or legislating laws. In the practice of doing laundry, for example, the skills of using detergents and different programmes of the washing machine, as well as techniques of avoiding washing and airing clothes instead, are combined with judgements of cleanliness. An important commonality of practice-theoretical approaches is a so-called flat ontology: an understanding of all social phenomena – small and large, local and global – sharing the same basic ingredients without a particular hierarchical order (Schatzki Reference Schatzki2002).

Rather than individual behaviour, technologies or social structures, social practices are the analytical focus of SPT and viewed as the core of social life. To trace and understand social change, SPT-inspired transition research therefore focuses on the ways in which practices shape and are shaped by changes in technologies, policies or infrastructures. As a central matter of concern, studies explore the extent to which social norms and cultural conventions prescribe appropriate ways of consumption and in how far shared infrastructures and the availability of goods and services shape consumption patterns. For instance, rather than considering how to get people to purchase energy-efficient washing machines, SPT investigate how and why they wash so much laundry in the first place (Sahakian et al. Reference Sahakian, Rau and Grealis2021). Doing laundry requires electricity and water and is connected to urban development, as well as to socially shared ideas of cleanliness, hygiene and care. Changes in consumption patterns can thus be difficult if they run counter to shared cultural, infrastructural and market conventions and expectations (Heiskanen and Laakso Reference Heiskanen, Laakso and Mont2019). Practices do, however, change, and next we discuss interventions in practice.

6.3 Empirical Example: ENERGISE Living Labs

Despite much of the research on sustainability transitions focusing on technological innovations, existing evidence shows that these alone do not suffice to avoid developments detrimental to life on earth. ‘Rebound effects’, referring to resources saved through increased efficiency being used elsewhere, ‘performance gaps’, denoting the failure of technologies to meet the expected energy savings in practice, and ‘value-action or attitude-behaviour gaps’, describing the lack of transfer from pro-environmental attitudes into action, have all been identified as reasons why sustainability transitions are not only a matter of technological innovation and individual behaviour change but also – or especially – of cultural conventions, social norms and systems of provision locking in the existing and escalating patterns of resource consumption. These underline the importance of the ‘social’ in socio-technical transitions (Shove and Walker Reference Shove and Walker2010). Social norms, conventions and relations have also increasingly been the target of interventions inspired by SPT. Here, to provide an example, we briefly present the EU-project ENERGISE (GA 727642), which set out to disrupt and innovate practices in heating and doing laundry through Living Labs involving real-life experimentation and co-creation of knowledge with 306 households across eight European countries.

The participating households were invited to attempt drastic changes, namely, to heat their living rooms to not more than 18°C and to reduce the amount of weekly laundry loads by half, over the course of four weeks each (preceded by a baseline and succeeded by a follow-up period) during the winter of 2018/19. The experiments addressed all elements comprising a practice by introducing new materials (such as warm socks and clothes brushes), meanings (such as critique of unsustainable practices and encouragement to experiment with alternatives) and competences (such as information on energy use and monitoring tools). On average across all countries, households reduced the temperature in their living room by 1°C and the number of weekly laundry cycles by one. Notably, the follow-up survey found that the downward trends in terms of both room temperatures and the laundry cycles continued beyond the experiments in most countries. As such, the Living Labs supported the households in innovating ways to perform their everyday practices with lower levels of energy use while still feeling sufficiently clean and comfortable (Sahakian et al. Reference Sahakian, Rau and Grealis2021). Moreover, the less energy-consuming practices seem to have persisted, based on a follow-up survey conducted among the Dutch and Finnish participants in 2023 (Matschoss et al. Reference Matschoss, Laakso and Heiskanen2024; Vasseur et al. Reference Vasseur, Backhaus, Fehres and Goldschmeding2024).

Overall, experiences and findings from the ENERGISE and similar projects on heat pumps (Judson et al. Reference Judson, Bell and Bulkeley2015), clothing (Jack Reference Jack2016), smart meters (Mela et al. Reference Mela, Peltomaa and Salo2018) and mobility (Svennevik et al. Reference Svennevik, Dijk and Arnfalk2021), among others, point to the contribution SPT can make to intervention design to facilitate transitions in everyday life. These findings do not negate the importance of more efficient and sustainable appliances and infrastructures. However, they highlight the centrality of social norms as well as the repetition of routines in the formation of more sustainable practices. SPT can hence provide an important perspective to complement transition research and practice.

6.4 Ongoing Debates between Social Practice Theories and the Multi-level Perspective on Socio-Technical Transitions

Research on transitions combining the approaches of SPT and the influential and widely used approach in sustainability transitions studies, the MLP, has burgeoned recently (see Keller et al. Reference Keller, Sahakian and Hirt2022b). Previously, Shove and Walker (Reference Shove and Walker2007) cautioned against the very idea of deliberately orienting and shaping transition trajectories as they are by necessity partially inclusive, contingent and potentially unstable due to evolving material forms and practices, while SPT and their flat ontology were criticised for their complexity and descriptive nature, supposedly lowering their ability to capture transition dynamics (Geels Reference Geels2011). The field has come a long way since (Köhler et al. Reference Köhler, Geels and Kern2019), yet combinatory studies do not attempt a synthesis of the two but rather explore and build on their complementarity while acknowledging their incompatibilities.

The conceptual premises of MLP presuppose a micro-meso-macro organisation from niches to landscapes (Geels Reference Geels2011, see also Chapter 2 in this book), while SPT stress a flat ontology. Also, there is some divergence in the respective understanding of agency: MLP attributes it to various actors on the niche, regime and landscape level (including powerful ‘incumbents’ such as market-leading energy companies or car manufacturers). In SPT, agent – the carrier of practices – is a somewhat vaguer concept which suggests targeting interventions not so much at actor groups, but at practices. This can pose difficulties for the intervention design because the borderlines between practices may be difficult to pinpoint (Vihalemm et al. Reference Vihalemm, Keller and Kiisel2015).

Further, both approaches see the source of change differently. For MLP, the basic transition ‘formula’ consists of mature niches ready to challenge the existing regime, especially if a landscape pressure (e.g. climate policy urging to retrofit houses or cut down emissions from transport) creates ‘cracks’ in the existing regime and opens windows of opportunity which enable niches to break through along specific pathways (Geels and Schot Reference Geels and Schot2007). In SPT, and as illustrated by our empirical example above, every practice contains seeds of both stability and change. The latter can emerge when practice elements are replaced with novel ones or combined differently, or if the populations of carriers of practices change. Practice-based conceptualisations of intervention distinguish types of practice change that range from novel practices emerging, modifying or substituting existing practices, to shifts in practice interlinkages and complete disruption and disappearance (Spurling et al. Reference Spurling, McMeekin and Shove2013; Keller et al. Reference Keller, Noorkõiv and Vihalemm2022a). Connections between practices may offer opportunities for more sustainable socio-material configurations, particularly through spatial and temporal organisation. By understanding how practices co-locate and co-evolve, such as within home settings or urban layouts, we can identify leverage points to alter practices toward greater sustainability (Klitkou et al. Reference Klitkou, Bolwig and Huber2022).

However, the commonalities between MLP and SPT, especially in understanding social change, are multiple: both are non-individualist and non-linear co-evolutionary approaches. They stress how human activities are always embedded in broader structures which both enable and constrain action. Over time, relatively stable configurations of social practices and socio-technical systems emerge that are characterised by lock-ins (i.e. path-dependency) and obduracy (Stanković et al. Reference Stanković, Dijk and Hommels2021). This explains why unsustainable everyday habits of driving or eating meat, firmly entrenched in modern western car-centric urban planning and meat-centric diets (embedded in specific socio-technical systems), are so complicated to ‘un-lock’.

As various studies have demonstrated, it is possible to nimbly combine MLP and SPT in a ‘zoom-in’ (granular SPT view of the unfolding of everyday action) and ‘zoom-out’ (a broader view of socio-technical systems) fashion. One fruitful line of inquiry is joining (MLP-based) vertical and (SPT-based) horizontal analysis to identify points of intersection between regimes and practices highlighting possible points of friction that can be turned into points of opportunity (Seyfang and Gilbert-Squires, Reference Seyfang and Gilbert-Squires2019). This adds complexity but also explanatory power, necessary context and detail sensitivity. For transition analysis and design this helps to avoid linear and an over-simplified ‘silver bullet’ understanding of individualistic awareness raising and behaviour change models, as well as techno-fixes that attempt to solve fuzzy socio-technical and socio-ecological problems with technological innovations only (Fuchs et al. Reference Fuchs, Sahakian and Gumbert2021: 56–58). Table 6.1 below juxtaposes the main tenets of both MLP and SPT primarily from the point of view of societal transition.

6.5 Emerging and Further Research

In this section, we point out some emerging lines of inquiry and potential avenues for further research and conceptual endeavours.

Firstly, within the field of SPT, the focus on large social phenomena is growing. Although a sizable body of existing research on everyday life and consumption has been, and still is, helpful for understanding transitions, the recent conceptualisations of, for example, trade, environmental pollution and inequality and accumulation of wealth as aspects and outcomes of relations between practices (Shove Reference Shove2023) provide a complementary perspective to transitions and generate a fundamentally different way of thinking about social change and ways to initiate it: all social phenomena are produced and reproduced through practices and it is these practices and their relations that need to change for sustainability transitions to occur.

Secondly, another emerging area is the practical application of SPT in policy making. While SPT have for years been considered as difficult in terms of their policy relevance (e.g. Keller et al. Reference Keller, Halkier and Wilska2016), the recent applications of SPT to reframe policy problems (e.g. Watson et al. Reference Watson, Browne and Evans2020) and our experiences from the ENERGISE project provide some avenues to engage policy actors with socio-technical complexity. These applications of SPT support the imagination and innovation of systems of provision that are less resource intensive than those with which we are familiar today, as well as the development of ‘disruptive practices’ (Kivimaa et al. Reference Kivimaa, Laakso, Lonkila and Kaljonen2021) such as prosumerism or veganism impacting on other practices in both systems of consumption and production.

Yet, it must be noted that SPT are hard to operationalise and hence to use for intervention design. Most challenging in this regard is the discrepancy between the clear-cut nature of the social practice as a heuristic device and the messiness of and diversity in everyday life. Aside from the difficulty to tell where one practice ends and another begins, the spatio-temporal extent of practices is hard to define. As practices are interdependent, consist of uncountable individual actions and involve complex material flows, an analysis of, for example, the environmental impacts of online shopping, becomes problematic. The comprehensiveness of SPT nevertheless points to more levers for change than simpler behavioural models, enabling more complex intervention design and analysis (for an example from the medical field, see Frost et al. Reference Frost, Wingham and Britten2020).

Thirdly, there is a need to design an integrated assessment conceptualisation and methodology that proceeds from SPT and helps evaluate the progress and success of transition-oriented interventions. Some beginnings of this have been laid out in Vihalemm et al. (Reference Vihalemm, Keller and Kiisel2015). As Watson et al. (Reference Watson, Browne and Evans2020) point out, SPT-informed policy design invites to think differently from mainstream ways of planning and evaluation and seeks ways for policy and intervention assessments to reflect complex system and practice change adequately and context-sensitively. A recent integrated framework to evaluate transformative innovation policy (Haddad and Bergek, Reference Haddad and Bergek2023) can provide useful guidance and inspiration in this regard.

Fourthly, we contend that as the sustainability transitions debate largely involves people’s relations to nature, it is noteworthy that neither socio-technical transition studies nor SPT have explicitly conceptualised the ecological dimension. Studies on resilience and complex socio-ecological systems (for the seminal texts, see e.g. Berkes and Folke Reference Berkes, Folke, Berkes and Folke1998), socio-technical transitions and social practices have so far mostly run in parallel. There is some emerging, yet scarce, literature discussing ‘socio-eco-technical systems’ (Wesselink et al. Reference Wesselink, Fritsch and Paavola2020), as well as uniting complex systems thinking and SPT (Labanca et al. Reference Labanca, Guimarães Pereira and Watson2020, Andersson et al. Reference Andersson, Lennerfors and Fornstedt2024). However, the material component in social practices, central as it may be, does not unequivocally theorise the distinction between man-made materials and environments and biophysical ones. This theoretical and empirical work on ‘socio-ecological practices’ remains to be done.

Fifthly, as has been recently highlighted in connection with multi-system dynamics research and deep transitions, there is a growing need to address justice in transition research and action, as multi-system transition creates multiple injustices between which a balance must be sought (Kanger et al. Reference Kanger, Schot and Sovacool2021; see also Chapter 16 in this book). Literature creating a dialogue between (particularly energy) transition justice and SPT is also making its first steps. For example, Sovacool et al. (Reference Sovacool, Hess and Cantoni2021) proposed an analytic framework for energy transitions from ‘cradle to grave’ where the Responsible Research and Innovation approach provides tools to analyse energy systems design, SPT to shed light on how energy is used by various social groups, and the justice perspective to look at societal, governance-related and moral consequences of transition. While this synergistic approach has a lot of merit, there is still considerable work to be done to understand how power and (in)justice are enacted on the level of everyday practices (see also Watson Reference Watson, Hui, Schatzki and Shove2016).

The sixth research topic resonates with the previous one. There is an emerging body of studies on the Global South that successfully co-employ MLP and SPT (e.g. Gazull et al. Reference Gazull, Gautier and Montagne2019; van Welie et al. Reference van Welie, Cherunya, Truffer and Murphy2018; see also Chapter 23 in this book), including reflections on shortcomings of MLP to capture ‘informal’ or ‘splintered’ socio-technical regimes. These are not well amenable to the analytic tools of the Global North socio-technical system concepts due to lacking regulation, standardisation and predictability, while being deeply embedded in cultural conventions thus resulting in remarkable system resilience. Yet, as these studies demonstrate, SPT concepts (such as the main practice elements) prove helpful in their relative universality and flexibility, especially when a socio-technical regime in its Global-North sense is analytically difficult to apprehend.

Finally, digitalisation permeates everyday practices in very diverse ways: not only are material elements of practices (e.g. home appliances and cars) becoming deeply digitalised, but the digital technologies reconfigure practices (e.g. mobility and health), and replace and reshape them (e.g. online working) (Klitkou et al. Reference Klitkou, Bolwig and Huber2022; Ryghaug et al. Reference Ryghaug, Skjølsvold and Heidenreich2018). All these emergent phenomena have considerable (positive and negative) sustainability impacts. On the other hand, digital methods can open new empirical avenues for SPT research. Relatedly, major new avenue for understanding emerges in connection with artificial intelligence and automation when the ‘human’ practices become fully or partly performed by non-human agents, which has been explored, for example, in energy demand-side management studies (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Kuch and Diamond2021).

6.6 Conclusions

To conclude, and as we have shown in this chapter, SPT provide valuable contributions to sustainability transitions research and in the contexts and situations in which the MLP – or other transition approaches – might need more explanatory power. SPT are malleable, flexible and universal in the sense that all social phenomena comprise practices and the change lies in the organisation and relations of practices. Hence, SPT are widely applicable to different kinds of transitions and allow a focus on intersections of systems as well as cross-sectoral scrutiny of stability and change, offering an alternative and complementary way to see social change. Sustainability transitions require not only technological innovations but also demand reduction by challenging the escalating norms, conventions and expectations towards appropriate actions and related resource use. SPT steer the attention to social innovations and people doing things differently. SPT-based interventions can hence act as disruptions, but lessons learned from them can also be helpful in getting through disruptions – which may be very useful for transition efforts requiring major changes in everyday life and social organisation.