Towards sustainable household consumption: exploring a practice oriented, participatory backcasting approach for sustainable home heating practices in Ireland

Current attempts to encourage sustainable consumption are failing to make significant advancements and consumption by households in daily practices continues to grow. Interventions in this area are often based on simplistic behavioural assumptions, which overlook the embeddedness of daily consumption practices and fail to challenge escalating consumption demands and expectations. Against this background there is a need to consider more radical socio-cultural, technological and organisational innovations that may fulfil the goals of daily practices more sustainably in the future. Taking the case of home heating, the most energy intensive practice in Irish households, this paper reports on a participatory backcasting study that developed future scenarios and action plans for sustainable heating. In contrast to conventional behavioural change models and forecasting techniques, this study adopted a social practice orientation. This paper focuses on the operationalisation of the social practice approach with special reference to the iterative processes around scenario development and the resultant backcasting outputs. Participant evaluations of the procedure are presented which indicate that despite significant operational complexity, the process was strongly valued and provided significant opportunity for learning amongst stakeholders involved. Whether such approaches can be integrated into governing systems, however will depend on a willingness amongst stakeholders to embrace a radical reconceptualisation of behaviour.