Entangled Practices: Governance, Sustainable Technologies, and Energy Consumption

In this article we provide a timely account of how sustainable technologies become entangled with cultural practices and thus co-evolve, influencing energy consumption. In doing so, we critique the approach current UK policy takes towards energy renewal and carbon reduction. We investigate the effectiveness of the social housing sector’s efforts to implement environmental policy initiatives that use a technology-driven approach. By looking at how social housing residents consume energy as part of domestic practices, we identify tensions between strategies to influence energy consumption by a housing association, and the ways residents incorporate sustainable technologies into everyday practices. Our findings reveal how sustainable technologies become enrolled in established practices: residents creatively develop novel routine strategies to accommodate new technologies to their daily routines. We contend that policy efforts to engender ‘behaviour change’ through a technology-driven approach have limitations. This approach ignores how practices become entangled, affecting energy consumption.