low carbon

The LowCarbonWorks project is  a response to the challenge of climate change and in the context of the UK Government’s policy to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This  challenge was made more urgent by the Stern Review and the fourth IPPC report.

The successful bid for funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) Carbon Vision Programme was sparked by a meeting between climate change strategy consultant, David Ballard,  Jonathan Aylen from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Consultant, Nick Morley, from Oakdene Hollins and  a bunch of engineers in a “sandpit” event organised by EPSRC. 

David was carrying out research into human and organisational change at CARPP and could see how useful his insights and action research approaches could be to the challenge of low carbon technology transfer. With the support of his supervisor, Peter Reason, colleagues and other interested parties, David put together a bid and helped get the project off the ground when funding was granted.  

Key questions and starting assumptions

Proven technologies exist which can save business money and carbon emissions but many have stalled, why? How can we unlock low carbon potential?

LCW argues that:

1) The barriers to transformation do not lie in the technologies themselves but in the wider social, political, economic and organizational context; and that it is important to integrate economic and technical dimensions with social, organizational and psychological dimensions of change.
2) There is interplay between technological, economic, and human factors which creates conservatism in the system as a whole.  Attempting to change one factor alone may be of limited impact. It may even be damaging if it causes the whole system to ‘lock in’ to a suboptimal path, but addressing several of these at the same time can result in a virtuous cycle of change.
3) To create change we need both awareness of the issues and a sense of agency—that we can initiate relevant change.  Our experience is that while awareness of climate change issues has increased significantly, people generally feel powerless in the face of planetary level events such as climate change and the experience of human agency remains very limited.
4) However, there are moments—for example when technological, economic and political factors come together -which offer a window of opportunity; when the capacity to make change is significantly increased. 

LCW is concerned to identify and capitalize on these moments. One strand is the Learning History with Local Government which identifies the way barriers to low carbon innovation have been overcome. A second strand is to work with industrial partners through a process of action research to more fully understand the contextual issues and find ways to respond to them so that stalled technologies and other business processes are more easily adopted. A third strand is to identify the opportunities that arise when capital stock is replenished . 

Using Action Research as a methodology

Principal Investigator, Professor Peter Reason who co-founded CARPP is a world-renowned expert in Action Research. Action research poses strategic questions of the type, ‘How might we do that?’ It values practical know-how more highly than abstract understanding. It is particularly strong when a problem cannot be tightly defined in terms of one discipline such as economics (as in this case): it allows the problem to be redefined as understanding develops. Action researchers join with organizational partners to create opportunities in which significant issues can be explored. They experiment in the work place to develop shared understanding and improved practice. This often takes the form of cycles of action (trying a new approach) and reflection (identifying what has been learned and relating that to wider theory and research so as to refocus efforts).

One purpose of action research is to create ‘learning organizations’ and wider networks of knowledge creation. Outcomes typically include both a better understanding of the issues and more effective action.

The action research work on this project will take place at different levels

* The local—exploring how to create change in carbon emissions in a particular location working closely with organizational members;
* The organizational—exploring how to integrate low carbon technology in a wider organizational and business context;
* The inter-organizational—bringing industrial partners together to exchange experiences so that different organizations engaged in transformation of carbon use can learn from each other;
* The wider network—in time we intend to engage a wider group of stakeholders to explore how what we learn can influence larger scale change at a policy levels by demonstrating the connections between human agency on the one hand and economic and technical opportunity on the other. 

Action researchers have particular skills in bringing people together and helping them ‘think together’.  As friendly outsiders, they have the capacity to facilitate helpful conversations, particularly where people from different backgrounds are coming together around a common purpose.  We believe this project can make a contribution both at the level of helping organizational members develop their ability to influence significant reductions in carbon emissions; and also by building on our work with different organizations to influence the wider debate about technological change and the carbon agenda.

This Website

Because action research places a high premium on wide scale participation and shared learning, we decided to create a website using the Web 2.0 resource, Wordpress which allows any member of the lcw community to post on site and comment on others’ posts with minimal moderation. Ideally, the site would grow an inquiry community spanning researchers, busineses, industrialists, policy-makers, citizens and so on, all of whom were looking at a question such as, “How can we ease the way to lower carbon production and consumption?” 

At the very least,  it provides a platform on which we can publish project progress, insights and outcomes. 

What you can do on this site

When you join the lcw community you will be able to comment on posts and submit posts for publication. They will not, however, appear on site until approved by a moderator. Any abusive or inappropriate comments will be removed and the person posting them will be downgraded to browser only.

However, you will be granted more privileges, including that of being able to publish directly to the site when it becomes obvious that you are not a risk to the smooth and legal functioning of the site.  The more active and relevant  your participation, the more rapid will be your promotion to site editor/moderator. �