Research at Keele Discovering Excellence | Page 20

Discovering Excellence | Sustainable Communities

Sustainable
Communities
Professor Andrew Dobson
Reducing Energy Consumption through
Community Knowledge Networks (RECCKN)
The ‘clean’ generation and use of energy is one of the biggest challenges facing
us, yet, while tackling energy issues at an individual level is important, less
is known about the potential for community-level initiatives as a context for
sustainable patterns of consumption to drive positive change
An interdisciplinary team at Keele
is using a case study methodology
to conduct focused or paired
comparisons of two communities,
in Newcastle-under-Lyme and
Shrewsbury respectively, with
different socioeconomic profiles.
The aim is to explore ‘knowledge
networks’ in these communities:
the ways in which information
about energy is shared between
people and organisations. It is
expected that the differences
between Newcastle-under-Lyme
and Shrewsbury will generate a
range of contrasting insights for
understanding how energy-relevant
knowledge circulates within
different communities.
Principal Investigator Professor
Andrew Dobson, Research
Institute for Social Sciences, said:
“The evidence is that top-down,
information-led approaches to
changing people’s energy-related
behaviour doesn’t work very
well. Our research suggests that
people already have quite a bit
of knowledge regarding energy
use, and it is important to take
this into account when designing
interventions so that these
interventions are ‘embedded’ in real
contexts. We also want to find out
how much people share energyrelated knowledge, and this is what
we hope to discover from our 60
household-level interviews.

Once we have a clearer idea of
how energy circulates between
households – and wh