GOVERNMENTALITY, PRACTICE AND TRANSITIONS IN ENERGY DEMAND

Dr Catherine Butler

Dr Karen Parkhill

@drcbutler c.butler@exeter.ac.uk

Project background

Invisible energy policy

• ‘What energy is used for, or how energy needs are made, is in part a reflection of how governments shape objectives, investments and ways of providing and working across many different policy domains’ (Shove et al. 2012)

• To effectively unravel, and understand how to reconfigure, the constitution of demand we must attend to a broad sweep of policies that extend beyond what is currently recognised as energy policy.

• Argue for a distinctive approach to or role for governance that can deliver on the requirements for a low carbon, more socially just society

Welfare and Employment Policy

Project aims

• Understand the implications of welfare and employment for practice and energy demand

• Develop insights into the key areas of tension between energy transition policies and social welfare goals

• Bring insights that might foster opportunities to reduce energy demand while meeting other important societal goals

Project Methods

WP1: Document analysis (Jan 2015 ongoing)

WP 2: Policy and stakeholder in-depth qualitative interviews – national to local

scales (October 2015 – July 2016

WP 3: Policy innovation workshops (summer 2017)

Governmentality: Key concepts

• Rationalities - ways of rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it becomes amenable to calculation and programming. Self responsibilisation as the primary means of governing within liberal democracies.

• Problematising – practice and policy are necessarily entangled and cannot be easily or productively separated in to cause and effect.

• Technologies - assemblages of persons, techniques, institutions and instruments for shaping conduct

(Miller and Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999)

Analysing issues of governance and policy change

AusterityWorklessness

Individual Deficits

Scope for reshaping policy

agendas

“Worklessness - There are currently around 3.9 million workless households in the UK. That is almost one in five of all households.” (Social Justice: Transforming Lives, 2012)

Work is undeniably the best and most sustainable route out of poverty”.

(DWP Reducing Poverty Indicators, Entrenched Worklessness, 2014)

Being employed helps promote recovery and rehabilitation and prevents the harmful physical, mental and social effects of long-term sickness absence. Fit for Work is designed to assist you as an employer in helping employees to get back to work as soon as is appropriate. (DWP, 2014)

Analysing issues of governance and policy change

“No, it’s bad enough trying to get DWP to work with directly related policy areas… I’ve done a lot of work on childcare fairly recently and the Department of Education thinks that childcare is about giving the best educational support to the child and doing what’s best for the child in education terms, DWP thinks childcare is about getting parents out to work and those two areas totally conflict” (Interviewee – policy/agency)

Intention, power, and policy change

How did we get change? To some extent because they brought in a review just about the time I was going in, it had started, where they were tightening up the descriptors and one of the things they did was talk to the agencies and they did interact with us and we did win a few descriptor changes, so there were a few things they changed but that doesn't mean remotely that we were happy with the result! It just means we got a few changes. (Interviewee Policy/Agency)

Work is – and always will be – the best route out of poverty and with welfare reform, Universal Credit,

tax cuts and the introduction of the

National Living Wage, we are making sure that it

always pays to work (David Cameron, 2016)

Technologies and boundary work

“…in areas like fuel poverty living adequately in a warm house and therefore saving on potential other social care expenditure. One department is seen as being responsible for actually making sure that you're keeping warm and that's an expensive commitment. And it's another department which is seeing the benefit of that from the fact that you are no longer calling on them for emergency health support and so on and so forth. We just do not know how to manage to bridge that sort of stuff.” (Interviewee charity – policy)

“…all the different evaluation projects that were happening to look at specific issues. This tends to happen in isolation effectively with research, because people get so focussed on the one specific thing that they’re looking at, but there was no overarching of bringing them all together”. (Interviewee – policy)

Technologies, measurement and causation in policy

“they’ll (DWP) produce impact reports on each of the policies, sometimes you have to read between the lines, they’re sometimes a bit… when I first looked at the impact report on disabled people and I thought, “this doesn't seem right, I’ve worked out how much Universal Credit is going to affect disabled people and some people are going to be hugely worse off and yet they’re saying there’s no impact”, and then I noticed this tiny little reference underneath, “we haven't taken into account support for disabled people”, I thought how do you decide there’s no impact because you haven't taken into account the policy? (Interviewee Policy Delivery)

Final thoughts…• Energy transitions are societal transitions – not being addressed

through efficiency and behavioral interventions (that layer on top of existing interventions)

• Governing institutions are always already intervening – even if through ‘freedoms’

• Requires alternative approaches to deliver the scale of transformation needed to meet climate change targets

• Governmentality offers analytic possibilities for deconstructing current forms of governance and for understanding how things could be different so that we can begin build alternatives

Thank you

c.butler@exeter.ac.uk

@drcbutler

Legacy policy and politics

“From that point of view things like the Winter Fuel Payment and the Cold Weather Payment are hugely welcome and greatly appreciated. Older people will fight fairly furiously to keep them despite the fact that every winter somebody somewhere is running a campaign saying we really can't let all the fat rich cats over the age of 80 have a Winter Fuel Payment”. (Interviewee charity – policy)

Analysing challenges of governance and policy change

• Rationalities and problematisations– policy integration, – legacies and implementation– intention and power

• Technologies – Causation and measurement– Boundary making

The role of the state

In modern societies the main agent of the construction of official categories though which both populations and minds are structured is the state, which, through a whole labour of

codification accompanied by economic and social effects (family allowances, for example) aims to favour a certain kind of organisation, to strengthen those who are in a position to

conform to encourage through all material and symbolic means logical and moral conformism...’”

(Bourdieu 1998: 71)

An example case: policies

Austerity Worklessness

Individual deficits in

ability, willingness

etc.

“Your work coach may refer you to these schemes… you may do work experience to add some career history to your CV”. (Back to Work Schemes, 2014)

Being employed helps promote recovery and rehabilitation and prevents the harmful physical, mental and social effects of long-term sickness absence. Fit for Work is designed to assist you as an employer in helping employees to get back to work as soon as is appropriate. (DWP, 2014)

An example case: practices

Austerity and funding cuts.

Worklessness – individual

Getting into work - fit for

work & employment

coaches

Practices –continuities and

increases in energy demand e.g. work travel

• Time travel surveys show increasing levels of travel related to work (Carlson-Kanyama and Linden, 1999)

• High job densities contribute toward increasing distances travelled for work (Boussauw et al. 2010)

• Work place energy use versus home working (Spurling and Mcmeekin, 2015)

Welfare, employment and energy issues

• Policies – Working practices – DWP policies on work

(benefits and worklessness; economic recovery and unemployment)

– Housing and household demographics – DWP role in codifying particular ideas about living arrangements and energy use; largest government estate

– Aging society – DWP policies on pension reform

• Processes– Digitalization – DWP policies on moving to digital

systems allied with closure of government buildings (reduction in estate)

– Buildings, estates and procurement – DWP one of the largest government estates