The Government’s recent efforts to improve household energy efficiency have consisted of supplier obligations—such as the Energy Company Obligation (ECO)—and the marketled ‘pay-as-you-save’ Green Deal. These policies have proved inadequate. ECO has delivered many improvements but at much lower rates than previous supplier obligation schemes. The Green Deal did not increase demand for energy efficiency...

Recent scholarship has conceptualised initiatives at the grassroots level as niche sites of innovation for sustainable development, comprising a diversity of innovations and sustainable practices that may (or may not) be usefully transferred to mainstream systems (Seyfang & Smith 2007). Sustainable housing communities such as cohousing and eco-villages, based around goals of improved sustainability and...

Low carbon community programs that encourage citizens to reduce their carbon emissions have been subject to various government and civil society trials in recent years. Behaviour change programs using ‘social marketing’ techniques have had mixed success in community carbon reduction because of a focus on individual control and lack of systemic context.

This report explores and quantifies the value proposition from the perspective of the owner occupier of a low carbon impact residential building.

This literature review is a project document produced for the CRC Low Carbon Living project “Transformation to Low Carbon Living: Social psychology of low carbon behavioural practice". The purpose of this project is twofold. First, it will develop an integrative understanding of how psychological factors interact with contextual factors present at multiple levels of analysis...