low carbon

Lowcarbonworks is an action research project aiming to tackle barriers which inhibit low carbon innovation. Our starting point was food and drink production as this sector is a heavy user of energy and has plenty of scope for further efficiencies.

Researchers from different disciplines from Bristol, Manchester and Bath Universities are working with industrial partners and other innovators in the public sector. They are working on a variety of projects logged in the Projects section.

A core principle underlying our projects is shared learning. We are not starting with answers but learning with partners. Some of these are focussed on running successful businesses, others may be creating the conditions for communities to flourish. What we aim to do together is to create further win/win opportunities for low carbon innovation.

This website is designed to encourage shared learning and inquiry. It also offers an opportunity to grow a wider community of people interested in working with us, formally or informally, virtually or face to face.

As a start or an experiment why not try adding something to the site? It’s quite easy to use once you’ve joined but for those more cautious we’ve compiled a beginners guide. (link to follow)

History
LCW came about in 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 recent Stern Review (Stern, 2006) and the fourth IPPC report.

The 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, 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 the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at Bath University’s School of Management which now hosts this site. David could see how useful his insights and action research approaches could be to the challenge of low carbon technology transfer. Proven technologies exist which can save both money and carbon emissions but many have stalled, why?

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 ways barriers to low carbon innovation are overcome on the local scale. 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. 

References:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2007). Climate Change 2007: The IPCC 4th Assessment Report. Retrieved February 4, 2007, from http://www.ipcc.ch/
Stern, N. (2006). Stern Review on the economics of climate change. London: HM Treasury.

Becoming an active reader requires using highlighter pens, scrawl, doodles, post-it notes and anything else you fancy to annotate a text, as participants in Bath Universitys’ LowCarbonWorks Learning History Workshop discover.

The idea is to respond to a particular narrative about low carbon innovation with your own ideas, emotional reactions, questions, and comments about what interested or surprised you and notes about themes of relevance to your own work.

In this way, new active readers expand the learning from the previous version of the text and to some extent make it their own.

Margaret Gearty, the action researcher behind this new application of the learning history to low carbon innovation in local authorities, defines two types of reader:

• The active reader is someone exploring the value and relevance of the History for their own learning.

• The participating reader is someone directly or indirectly involved in the history who have helped to shape it with stories and comments about how events took shape.

An important definition of a learning history is “a jointly told tale”. It differs from a typical case study because it seeks out more than one perspective and includes more of the messy human dimension of change.

If you’ve had the active reader experience, add your comments about it to this post.

You can also click on this link for an example of a learning history about the development of a combined heat and power district heating and cooling scheme by Southampton City Council.

LCW’s Principal Investigator, is Peter Reason, Professor of Action Research/Practice and Director of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice in the School of Management at the University of Bath.

Peter is project co-ordinator and chairs the steering group.

His major academic work has been to contribute to the development of a participatory worldview and associated approaches to inquiry, and in particular to the theory and practice of co-operative inquiry. He is interested in developing this methodology further through the Low Carbon Works project and exploring how transformation can be grounded in an ecological perspective.

Quick link to Learning History blog site 

A highly interactive Learning History workshop for achieving low carbon reduction in local authorities has led to the creation of the UK’s first ever online collaborative learning history. Created and hosted by CARPP PhD action researcher, Margaret Gearty, the site is inviting comments and continuing participation from those who came to the workshop and others whom they may recommend.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the workshop in Bath in February 2008, you can read  the various stories of low carbon innovation such as the development of a district heating system in Southampton or the widespread use of biomass in Barnsley and see and hear what other people learnt.

The idea of using blogging technology, although innovative when applied to creating a joint learning history, has already established a place in higher education. For some background to how this learning movement is developing we refer you to the following paper: Exploring the place of blogs in higher education

Story teller and facilitator, Geoff Mead

Story Circle Guidelines 

The story circle was a feature of lowcarbonworks’ first successful learning history event for local authorities in February 2008. Story telling was a particularly rich experience for some participants who told us that there was very rarely a forum such as the one we created for the rapid exchange of inspiring ideas. Telling a story is also a lot more personal, some would say intimate, than reading a case study. Some of the seemingly random or irrelevant detail left out of a traditional case study can be found to have enormous value for engaging and resonating with an audience’s own experience and need to feel a sense of relationship with the story.

However, there is a discipline to a successful exchange of stories so some ground rules help. Accesible from the green link above are the guidelines we used at our event which was facilitated by Geoff Mead from the Centre for Narrative Leadership. We include them for the benefit of people who want to give this exercise a go.

Our prompt was firstly a trial round where the instruction was: “Tell a one minute story about a person, an event or a time that first made you aware of the need for carbon reduction”. Followed by a round using the instruction: Tell a three minute story from your own experience abaout a successful innovation (for carbon reduction) in a Local Authority or other public setting.” �

As councils and organisations across the UK increasingly recognise the need to put together plans and strategies to tackle climate change there is an ever more urgent need to understand how to translate these into timely action on the ground. There is also a need to communicate and share experiences about the changes we are making. The Learning History workshop held in Bath on 25th and 26th February was aimed at those practitioners in Local Authorities and elsewhere who are trying to understand and make the necessary changes in their own organisations.

At the workshop, Learning Histories of well-known cases were presented and common themes across these examples explored. Learning Histories foreground a human story against a more conventional case account. Moments of doubt, lucky breaks, twists and turns - these all serve to confirm a lamented response to many ‘good news’ stories: i.e. that could never happen here! Indeed this response is true, but by working narratively, participants have the opportunity to work with these stories, identifying themes and linking them to their own experiences so that they draw learning that is relevant for their own situation in a way that can be helpful and empowering for all involved.

Featured Examples and Take-Aways

The following 5 examples of innovative work in local government can be downloaded. Click on each link to take you to a page where you can also leave comments if you were at the workshop. (Subject to joining and promotion to author status)

- The Nottingham Declaration

- Barnsley’s push on Biomass

- “The Merton Rule”.

- Kirklees’ solar villages and

- Southampton’s district heating network

Later we will post a copy of the overall Learning History that will be based on data from the workshop.

Barnsley Learning History File

Open the A5 pdf above to read a multi-layered account of how Barnsley adopted biomass and then add any comments in the comments box below.�

What is Action Research ?

An action researcher does a lot of on-site fieldwork

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 engineering or economics: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.

Gill is a tutor on the MSc Responsibility in Business Practice which she co-founded with Peter Reason and Judi Marshall at Bath University’s Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice.

Gill has worked in the area of business and social responsibility since the early 1990s, with Bristol University, and then with the New Academy of Business from 1995, establishing its values led management education. She has particular interests in the role of action research in organizational change, and in gender and other forms of diversity.

Gill and Michelle Williams are the lcw action researchers looking at how some of the organisational and communication barriers to the take up of air cycle technology can be dissolved.�