Build It Like You Mean It: Replicating Ethical Innovation in Physical and Institutional Design

This chapter focuses on the practices and aspirations of householders in relation to governance for sustainability. Kersty Hobson’s argument that domestic consumption of green goods’, such as shower timers and energy efficient lighting, is not just the outcome of such governance but also constitutive of it, is insightful. Matt Watson and Ruth Lane address the issue of up-scaling of household sustainability initiatives that presently sit outside of green governance frameworks, so as to bring about changes to these frameworks. The present restricted framing of waste management governance as an environmental agenda fits poorly with the broad range of social and environmental motives that give impetus to household practices of reuse. Neat governmental agendas for securing sustainability are apt to become unpicked and tangled up in the complexity of household consumption practices. Neo-liberal governance both undermines and relies upon territorial social formations, including the territory of the neo-liberal home so neglected, until recently, by researchers.