Alison L Browne
Biographic Data
| ID | 1448165 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison L Browne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison L |
| FAMILY NAME | Browne |
| SIGNATURE | BROWNE A L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1048-6724 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Demand thinking in futures research: Characterising assumptions in studies of domestic water use
How resource demand is conceptualised within futures studies plays a decisive role in shaping research outcomes and demand management strategies. This paper proposes the term demand thinking as an analytical tool to examine these conceptualisations, making explicit the assumptions through which futures are imagined and acted upon. In doing so, it contributes to debates on how futures methods and modelling practices condition which forms of interv…
On shaky grounds: Situating safe sanitation in Mumbai’s sub-surface legacies of waste
Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai
In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how administrative precarity and infrastructural vio…
Everyday geographies of uneven water infrastructures and practices in China
China has committed to providing equitable, available, improved, and safe water in its cities, and has worked to achieve ecological civilisation and the Sustainable Development Goals. Geographical research about water governance in China has largely focused on the state, market, and large-scale water infrastructure projects. There is still a limited pool of empirical evidence and theorising about how everyday infrastructures and practices shape u…
Pluralising the materiality of water: More-than-water, lively waters, water with, and the agency of hydro-social assemblages
This special issue combines insights from an array of theoretical perspectives, including political ecology, Indigenous studies, and more-than-human and feminist geographies to engage with a critical question for water studies: What are the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of a closer engagement with the matter and properties of water and infrastructure? To answer this question, the contributions draw on a geographically and…
Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review
This bilingual systematic review captures 10 years (2010–2020) of debates and evidence from human geography research that foregrounds the lived experiences of Chinese citizens in accounts of environmental change. In this first bilingual review of everyday environmental geographies, we analyse 157 papers from 10 English and 10 mainland Chinese journals, using a range of thematic categorisations to capture qualitative environment–society research o…
Powershifts, organisational value, and water management: Digital transformation of Ghana's public water utility
There are fundamental unresolved questions about the nature of the interplay between digital innovations and water management processes. However, there has been little research on how increasing digital transformation impacts water management and infrastructure in the Global South. This article draws on a socio-technical lens and primary field data to analyse the digital transformation of water management in Ghana's state water utility company. D…
Sanitation configurations in Lilongwe: Everyday experiences on and off the grid
Scholars have called for increased attention to the practices through which residents of southern cities create and use infrastructure. The failures and disruptions of many particular artefacts have meant that people often develop multiple ways to access water, electricity, or transportation, even if all of them have limitations. For sanitation, thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations can help us to see connections between to…
Everyday domestic water and energy consumption in Shanghai homes: The resurgence and persistence of gendered practices in China
China's ecological civilization centralises households as a unit of intervention for environmental policy. The household constructed within such policy reduces complex social arrangements and processes and results in efficiency and behaviour change interventions. Such interventions have had limited success and contribute to reproducing inequality. This paper uses ethnographic methods to develop insights into everyday practices that consume energy…
Addressing Water Poverty Under Climate Crisis: Implications for Social Policy
Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in plac…
Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures
While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering th…
Lifestyle mobilities and urban environmental degradation: Evidence from China
Building on the intersection of lifestyle mobilities, changing environments and climates and practice theories, this paper explores how lifestyle mobilities are mobilised in response to the pervasive environmental and climatic stress in China. Grounded in an ethnographic study conducted in a lifestyle destination with lifestyle travellers moored across multiple domestic nature-based destinations, this paper finds that the motivations towards life…
Creating water demand: Bathing practice performances in a Chinese hot spring tourist town
The commodification of hot spring bathing reflects a diversification of alternative modalities for healing and leisure. It also presents challenges for the development of sustainable tourism. However, whether and how tourist activities generate environmental challenges at hot spring destinations has received scant attention from scholars. Situated in the increasing contributions that practice theories make to tourism and sustainability studies, t…
Talking methods, talking about methods: Invoking the transformative potential of social methods through animals, objects and how‐to instructions
This paper focuses on "talking" methods, noting their wide application across the social sciences, and identifies potential spaces for innovation in this field. Drawing on interview material from the Methods for Change project, we argue that researching methods requires creative approaches to talk. With research methods as our focus, we draw on data collected from online interviews with 36 academics, which aimed to explore the transformative pote…
Smartening up: User experience with smart water metering infrastructure in an African city
Worldwide, smart metering is becoming increasingly prevalent in the utility sector, sometimes as part of extensive smart grid projects or within strategies aimed at the digital transformation of utilities. In the water sector, smart water metering infrastructure has been positioned to alleviate key water management and water access challenges. To date, there has been little empirical investigation into how it is deployed, implemented and experien…
Without cleanliness we can't lead the life, no?' Cleanliness practices, (in)accessible infrastructures, social (im)mobility and (un)sustainable consumption in Mysore, India
As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infrastructures are increasing even faster than the growing population. This paper explores the relationships between access to infrastructures, social mobility and resource consumption in everyday lives through the case of cleanliness in Mysore, Southern India. We draw on interviews with 28 Mysoreans about cleanliness perceptions and practices. Analysing …
Absorbents, practices, and infrastructures: Changing socio-material landscapes of menstrual waste in Lilongwe, Malawi
In contexts of limited access to urban infrastructures and restrictive cultural norms, managing menstrual waste has important sustainability implications and complicates the menstrual experiences of women. However menstrual waste management has remained largely under-researched. To address this research and policy-practice gap we combine postcolonial and African feminist scholarship with social practice theory to explore the socio-materialities o…
Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai
Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in…
Challenges and opportunities for re-framing resource use policy with practice theories: The change points approach
Concerns about the climate crisis and the escalating pace of global consumption are accelerating the pressure on governments to moderate public demand for resources like water, food and energy. Notwithstanding their increasing sophistication, standard behavioural change approaches continue to be criticised for a narrow understanding of what shapes behaviour. One alternative theoretical position comes from practice theories, which draw on interpre…
Guiding carbon farming using interdisciplinary mixed methods mapping
In recognition of the need to address complex environmental problems, some ecological studies have adopted social research methods to better understand the complexity of social‐ecological systems management. The overwhelming majority of these studies stop short of fully embracing qualitative methodologies. The lack of integrative social and natural science data for a topic such as soil carbon farming is problematic as theoretical carbon sequestra…
Already existing’ sustainability experiments: Lessons on water demand, cleanliness practices and climate adaptation from the UK camping music festival
Experimentation has become a popular term amongst those interested in fostering more sustainable social futures. But the ways in which researchers and policy makers have thought about experimentation have generally been with reference to new infrastructural and governance conditions. Focusing on intentional interventions downplays the capacity for change stemming from peoples’ already existing practices. In this paper, we propose that the camping…
Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018
Envisioning surprises: How social sciences could help models represent ‘deep uncertainty’ in future energy and water demand
Medium- and long-term planning, defined here as 10 years or longer, in the energy and water sectors is fraught with uncertainty, exacerbated by an accelerating ‘paradigm shift’. The new paradigm is characterised by a changing climate and rapid adoption of new technologies, accompanied by changes in end-use practices. Traditional methods (such as econometrics) do not incorporate these diverse and dynamic aspects and perform poorly when exploring l…
The water–energy–food nexus at home: New opportunities for policy interventions in household sustainability
The nexus of water–energy–food ( WEF ) is as apparent at the household scale as it is anywhere else. We introduce the “Nexus at Home” as a starting point for exploring the dynamics of WEF resource use and household sustainability. Drawing on two research projects we focus specifically on domestic kitchens as a site where practices of cooking, eating, cleaning and disposing of waste come together. While these practices have long been targets for p…
Stocks and flows of natural and human-derived capital in ecosystem services
There is growing interest in the role that natural capital plays in underpinning ecosystem services. Yet, there remain differences and inconsistencies in the conceptualisation of capital and ecosystem services and the role that humans play in their delivery. Using worked examples in a stocks and flows systems approach, we show that both natural capital (NC) and human-derived (produced, human, social, cultural, financial) capital (HDC) are necessa…
Can people talk together about their practices? Focus groups, humour and the sensitive dynamics of everyday life
The exploration of everyday social practices related to sustainability often touches on the most invisible parts of people's everyday lives. Given the multiple cultural forces that govern cleanliness and comfort, and the intimate spheres in which these practices are performed, practices associated with everyday water use (and associated energy consumption) bump up against ‘the taboo’. While it has been resolved that ‘people can talk about their p…
Challenges and opportunities for re-framing resource use policy with practice theories: The change points approach
Concerns about the climate crisis and the escalating pace of global consumption are accelerating the pressure on governments to moderate public demand for resources like water, food and energy. Notwithstanding their increasing sophistication, standard behavioural change approaches continue to be criticised for a narrow understanding of what shapes behaviour. One alternative theoretical position comes from practice theories, which draw on interpre…
Patterns of practice: A reflection on the development of quantitative/mixed methodologies capturing everyday life related to water consumption in the UK
There is a growing body of research arguing the relevance of practice approaches to understand resource consumption, and to highlight alternative pathways to sustainability. These practice approaches offer an alternative conceptualisation of demand and have been demonstrated largely by qualitative research, particularly in the work on water and energy consumption in the home. However, these historical narratives and qualitative research have not,…
The water–energy–food nexus at home: New opportunities for policy interventions in household sustainability
The nexus of water–energy–food ( WEF ) is as apparent at the household scale as it is anywhere else. We introduce the “Nexus at Home” as a starting point for exploring the dynamics of WEF resource use and household sustainability. Drawing on two research projects we focus specifically on domestic kitchens as a site where practices of cooking, eating, cleaning and disposing of waste come together. While these practices have long been targets for p…
Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures
While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering th…
Without cleanliness we can't lead the life, no?' Cleanliness practices, (in)accessible infrastructures, social (im)mobility and (un)sustainable consumption in Mysore, India
As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infrastructures are increasing even faster than the growing population. This paper explores the relationships between access to infrastructures, social mobility and resource consumption in everyday lives through the case of cleanliness in Mysore, Southern India. We draw on interviews with 28 Mysoreans about cleanliness perceptions and practices. Analysing …
Already existing’ sustainability experiments: Lessons on water demand, cleanliness practices and climate adaptation from the UK camping music festival
Experimentation has become a popular term amongst those interested in fostering more sustainable social futures. But the ways in which researchers and policy makers have thought about experimentation have generally been with reference to new infrastructural and governance conditions. Focusing on intentional interventions downplays the capacity for change stemming from peoples’ already existing practices. In this paper, we propose that the camping…
Stocks and flows of natural and human-derived capital in ecosystem services
There is growing interest in the role that natural capital plays in underpinning ecosystem services. Yet, there remain differences and inconsistencies in the conceptualisation of capital and ecosystem services and the role that humans play in their delivery. Using worked examples in a stocks and flows systems approach, we show that both natural capital (NC) and human-derived (produced, human, social, cultural, financial) capital (HDC) are necessa…
Public Policy, Participation and the Third Position: The Implication of Engaging Communities on their Own Terms
Policy development and implementation should be fundamental for community psychologists in their endeavors to create social change. Policy necessarily is engaged at broad social and political levels, but it is mediated through communities and individuals, and thus appealing for our discipline. We argue that there are increasing opportunities for social input in liberal democracies with the growing awareness of the need to consider social factors …
Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai
Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in…
Talking methods, talking about methods: Invoking the transformative potential of social methods through animals, objects and how‐to instructions
This paper focuses on "talking" methods, noting their wide application across the social sciences, and identifies potential spaces for innovation in this field. Drawing on interview material from the Methods for Change project, we argue that researching methods requires creative approaches to talk. With research methods as our focus, we draw on data collected from online interviews with 36 academics, which aimed to explore the transformative pote…
Absorbents, practices, and infrastructures: Changing socio-material landscapes of menstrual waste in Lilongwe, Malawi
In contexts of limited access to urban infrastructures and restrictive cultural norms, managing menstrual waste has important sustainability implications and complicates the menstrual experiences of women. However menstrual waste management has remained largely under-researched. To address this research and policy-practice gap we combine postcolonial and African feminist scholarship with social practice theory to explore the socio-materialities o…
Envisioning surprises: How social sciences could help models represent ‘deep uncertainty’ in future energy and water demand
Medium- and long-term planning, defined here as 10 years or longer, in the energy and water sectors is fraught with uncertainty, exacerbated by an accelerating ‘paradigm shift’. The new paradigm is characterised by a changing climate and rapid adoption of new technologies, accompanied by changes in end-use practices. Traditional methods (such as econometrics) do not incorporate these diverse and dynamic aspects and perform poorly when exploring l…
Pluralising the materiality of water: More-than-water, lively waters, water with, and the agency of hydro-social assemblages
This special issue combines insights from an array of theoretical perspectives, including political ecology, Indigenous studies, and more-than-human and feminist geographies to engage with a critical question for water studies: What are the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of a closer engagement with the matter and properties of water and infrastructure? To answer this question, the contributions draw on a geographically and…
Smartening up: User experience with smart water metering infrastructure in an African city
Worldwide, smart metering is becoming increasingly prevalent in the utility sector, sometimes as part of extensive smart grid projects or within strategies aimed at the digital transformation of utilities. In the water sector, smart water metering infrastructure has been positioned to alleviate key water management and water access challenges. To date, there has been little empirical investigation into how it is deployed, implemented and experien…
Chasing Our Tails: Psychological, Institutional and Societal Paradoxes in Natural Resource Management, Sustainability, and Climate Change in Australia
Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) have been guiding frameworks in Australia for a number of decades. Recently, NRM and ESD have become central to climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore the psychological paradoxes that function within climate change settings, with particular attention devoted to the way that research and development reinforces these paradoxes by advocating for participat…
Sanitation configurations in Lilongwe: Everyday experiences on and off the grid
Scholars have called for increased attention to the practices through which residents of southern cities create and use infrastructure. The failures and disruptions of many particular artefacts have meant that people often develop multiple ways to access water, electricity, or transportation, even if all of them have limitations. For sanitation, thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations can help us to see connections between to…
Everyday domestic water and energy consumption in Shanghai homes: The resurgence and persistence of gendered practices in China
China's ecological civilization centralises households as a unit of intervention for environmental policy. The household constructed within such policy reduces complex social arrangements and processes and results in efficiency and behaviour change interventions. Such interventions have had limited success and contribute to reproducing inequality. This paper uses ethnographic methods to develop insights into everyday practices that consume energy…
Addressing Water Poverty Under Climate Crisis: Implications for Social Policy
Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in plac…
Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai
In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how administrative precarity and infrastructural vio…
Public Policy, Participation and the Third Position: The Implication of Engaging Communities on their Own Terms
Policy development and implementation should be fundamental for community psychologists in their endeavors to create social change. Policy necessarily is engaged at broad social and political levels, but it is mediated through communities and individuals, and thus appealing for our discipline. We argue that there are increasing opportunities for social input in liberal democracies with the growing awareness of the need to consider social factors …
Chasing Our Tails: Psychological, Institutional and Societal Paradoxes in Natural Resource Management, Sustainability, and Climate Change in Australia
Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) have been guiding frameworks in Australia for a number of decades. Recently, NRM and ESD have become central to climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore the psychological paradoxes that function within climate change settings, with particular attention devoted to the way that research and development reinforces these paradoxes by advocating for participat…
Patterns of practice: A reflection on the development of quantitative/mixed methodologies capturing everyday life related to water consumption in the UK
There is a growing body of research arguing the relevance of practice approaches to understand resource consumption, and to highlight alternative pathways to sustainability. These practice approaches offer an alternative conceptualisation of demand and have been demonstrated largely by qualitative research, particularly in the work on water and energy consumption in the home. However, these historical narratives and qualitative research have not,…
Can people talk together about their practices? Focus groups, humour and the sensitive dynamics of everyday life
The exploration of everyday social practices related to sustainability often touches on the most invisible parts of people's everyday lives. Given the multiple cultural forces that govern cleanliness and comfort, and the intimate spheres in which these practices are performed, practices associated with everyday water use (and associated energy consumption) bump up against ‘the taboo’. While it has been resolved that ‘people can talk about their p…
Stocks and flows of natural and human-derived capital in ecosystem services
There is growing interest in the role that natural capital plays in underpinning ecosystem services. Yet, there remain differences and inconsistencies in the conceptualisation of capital and ecosystem services and the role that humans play in their delivery. Using worked examples in a stocks and flows systems approach, we show that both natural capital (NC) and human-derived (produced, human, social, cultural, financial) capital (HDC) are necessa…
Envisioning surprises: How social sciences could help models represent ‘deep uncertainty’ in future energy and water demand
Medium- and long-term planning, defined here as 10 years or longer, in the energy and water sectors is fraught with uncertainty, exacerbated by an accelerating ‘paradigm shift’. The new paradigm is characterised by a changing climate and rapid adoption of new technologies, accompanied by changes in end-use practices. Traditional methods (such as econometrics) do not incorporate these diverse and dynamic aspects and perform poorly when exploring l…
The water–energy–food nexus at home: New opportunities for policy interventions in household sustainability
The nexus of water–energy–food ( WEF ) is as apparent at the household scale as it is anywhere else. We introduce the “Nexus at Home” as a starting point for exploring the dynamics of WEF resource use and household sustainability. Drawing on two research projects we focus specifically on domestic kitchens as a site where practices of cooking, eating, cleaning and disposing of waste come together. While these practices have long been targets for p…
Guiding carbon farming using interdisciplinary mixed methods mapping
In recognition of the need to address complex environmental problems, some ecological studies have adopted social research methods to better understand the complexity of social‐ecological systems management. The overwhelming majority of these studies stop short of fully embracing qualitative methodologies. The lack of integrative social and natural science data for a topic such as soil carbon farming is problematic as theoretical carbon sequestra…
Already existing’ sustainability experiments: Lessons on water demand, cleanliness practices and climate adaptation from the UK camping music festival
Experimentation has become a popular term amongst those interested in fostering more sustainable social futures. But the ways in which researchers and policy makers have thought about experimentation have generally been with reference to new infrastructural and governance conditions. Focusing on intentional interventions downplays the capacity for change stemming from peoples’ already existing practices. In this paper, we propose that the camping…
Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018
Challenges and opportunities for re-framing resource use policy with practice theories: The change points approach
Concerns about the climate crisis and the escalating pace of global consumption are accelerating the pressure on governments to moderate public demand for resources like water, food and energy. Notwithstanding their increasing sophistication, standard behavioural change approaches continue to be criticised for a narrow understanding of what shapes behaviour. One alternative theoretical position comes from practice theories, which draw on interpre…
Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai
Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in…
Creating water demand: Bathing practice performances in a Chinese hot spring tourist town
The commodification of hot spring bathing reflects a diversification of alternative modalities for healing and leisure. It also presents challenges for the development of sustainable tourism. However, whether and how tourist activities generate environmental challenges at hot spring destinations has received scant attention from scholars. Situated in the increasing contributions that practice theories make to tourism and sustainability studies, t…
Talking methods, talking about methods: Invoking the transformative potential of social methods through animals, objects and how‐to instructions
This paper focuses on "talking" methods, noting their wide application across the social sciences, and identifies potential spaces for innovation in this field. Drawing on interview material from the Methods for Change project, we argue that researching methods requires creative approaches to talk. With research methods as our focus, we draw on data collected from online interviews with 36 academics, which aimed to explore the transformative pote…
Smartening up: User experience with smart water metering infrastructure in an African city
Worldwide, smart metering is becoming increasingly prevalent in the utility sector, sometimes as part of extensive smart grid projects or within strategies aimed at the digital transformation of utilities. In the water sector, smart water metering infrastructure has been positioned to alleviate key water management and water access challenges. To date, there has been little empirical investigation into how it is deployed, implemented and experien…
Without cleanliness we can't lead the life, no?' Cleanliness practices, (in)accessible infrastructures, social (im)mobility and (un)sustainable consumption in Mysore, India
As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infrastructures are increasing even faster than the growing population. This paper explores the relationships between access to infrastructures, social mobility and resource consumption in everyday lives through the case of cleanliness in Mysore, Southern India. We draw on interviews with 28 Mysoreans about cleanliness perceptions and practices. Analysing …
Absorbents, practices, and infrastructures: Changing socio-material landscapes of menstrual waste in Lilongwe, Malawi
In contexts of limited access to urban infrastructures and restrictive cultural norms, managing menstrual waste has important sustainability implications and complicates the menstrual experiences of women. However menstrual waste management has remained largely under-researched. To address this research and policy-practice gap we combine postcolonial and African feminist scholarship with social practice theory to explore the socio-materialities o…
Everyday domestic water and energy consumption in Shanghai homes: The resurgence and persistence of gendered practices in China
China's ecological civilization centralises households as a unit of intervention for environmental policy. The household constructed within such policy reduces complex social arrangements and processes and results in efficiency and behaviour change interventions. Such interventions have had limited success and contribute to reproducing inequality. This paper uses ethnographic methods to develop insights into everyday practices that consume energy…
Addressing Water Poverty Under Climate Crisis: Implications for Social Policy
Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in plac…
Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures
While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering th…
Lifestyle mobilities and urban environmental degradation: Evidence from China
Building on the intersection of lifestyle mobilities, changing environments and climates and practice theories, this paper explores how lifestyle mobilities are mobilised in response to the pervasive environmental and climatic stress in China. Grounded in an ethnographic study conducted in a lifestyle destination with lifestyle travellers moored across multiple domestic nature-based destinations, this paper finds that the motivations towards life…
Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review
This bilingual systematic review captures 10 years (2010–2020) of debates and evidence from human geography research that foregrounds the lived experiences of Chinese citizens in accounts of environmental change. In this first bilingual review of everyday environmental geographies, we analyse 157 papers from 10 English and 10 mainland Chinese journals, using a range of thematic categorisations to capture qualitative environment–society research o…
Powershifts, organisational value, and water management: Digital transformation of Ghana's public water utility
There are fundamental unresolved questions about the nature of the interplay between digital innovations and water management processes. However, there has been little research on how increasing digital transformation impacts water management and infrastructure in the Global South. This article draws on a socio-technical lens and primary field data to analyse the digital transformation of water management in Ghana's state water utility company. D…
Sanitation configurations in Lilongwe: Everyday experiences on and off the grid
Scholars have called for increased attention to the practices through which residents of southern cities create and use infrastructure. The failures and disruptions of many particular artefacts have meant that people often develop multiple ways to access water, electricity, or transportation, even if all of them have limitations. For sanitation, thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations can help us to see connections between to…
Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai
In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how administrative precarity and infrastructural vio…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Economics (12 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Sustainability (7 works) · Ecology (6 works)