Changing behaviour for a low-carbon future

How we move about is too often presented as a matter either of personal choice (amenable to shifting through information or incentive) or as structured necessity (‘I have no choice but to drive’). Thinking about mobility in terms of practices is a means of escaping this dualism between a focus either on individual agency or social structure. Instead we can focus on the practices of mobility such as cycling, driving or passengering, and the ways in which those practices relate to others such as of working, playing and shopping. Through this the ways in which we accomplish mobility emerges as an outcome of collective routines, norms, meanings, competencies, technologies and purposes, transpiring amidst the organisation of space including infrastructures and built environments. Such understanding helps to account for the obduracy of unsustainable and unhealthy ways of doing mobility, and promises to illuminate diverse means of intervening to shift such patterns.

Practice theory’s emphasis on themes of convention and habit can obscure the ways in which it provides distinctive means of accounting for change. Rather than assume permanence, it starts from an understanding of all social relations as essentially mutable, meaning that we need to account for the remarkable continuities of individual lives, of institutions and of patterns social order. Recent work in the field has sought to develop and demonstrate the inherent capacity of practice theory to account for change and inform intervention, including in relation to personal mobility. For example, by understanding the diverse shifting relations that underlie the decline of cycling and the rise of car driving in the mid-20th century northern Europe we can more usefully understand the contemporary increases in cycling in some places, and better inform interventions to enable change more broadly.

First, practice theory accounts for the profoundly limited effects of interventions based on informing people to make ‘better’ choices. Mostly, the way people do mobility is structured into the ways their lives are organised in space and time leaving limited space for choosing to travel otherwise. Second, it can illuminate different means of intervention, such as seeking to normalise lower carbon means of mobility, as can be seen in a few places in the UK where cycling has become increasingly normal; or by shifting the social meaning of higher carbon modes of mobility so they are relatively less acceptable. A focus on practices also illuminates how mobility is largely a means of coordination between other practices – getting from one site of doing specific things (say home) to another site (say work) with an acceptable amount of time and trouble. Interventions to make mobility more sustainable might therefore better look to intervene in the practices which engender mobility. Ultimately, though, shifting personal mobility to a meaningfully sustainable state means a degree of transformation which entails change throughout the system of mobility, requiring changes to practices also in planning offices, company board rooms and government ministries, as well as on the roads.