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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 long-term futures. This paper critiques existing methods and explores how interdisciplinary insights could provide methodological innovation for exploring future energy and water demand. The paper identifies four attributes that methods need to capture to reflect at least some of the uncertainty associated with the paradigm shift: stochastic events, the diversity of behaviour, policy interventions and the ‘co-evolution’ of the variables affecting demand. Machine-learning methods can account for some of the four identified attributes and can be further enhanced by insights from across the psychological and social sciences (human geography and sociology), incorporating rebound effect and the unevenness of demand, and acknowledging the emergent nature of demand. The findings have implications for urban and regional planning of infrastructure and contribute to current debates on nexus thinking for energy and water resource management.

Sociological contributions to debates surrounding sustainable consumption have presented strong critiques of methodological individualism and technological determinism. Drawing from a range of sociological insights from the fields of consumption, everyday life and science and technology studies, these critiques emphasize the recursivity between (a) everyday performances and object use, and (b) how those performances are socially ordered. Empirical studies have, however, been criticized as being descriptive of micro-level phenomena to the exclusion of explanations of processes of reproduction or change. Developing a methodological approach that examines sequences of activities this article explores different forms of coordination (activity, inter-personal and material) that condition the temporal and material flows of laundry practices. Doing so produces an analysis that de-centres technologies and individual performances, allowing for the identification of mechanisms that order the practice of laundry at the personal, household and societal levels. These are: social relations; cultural conventions; domestic materiality; and institutionalized temporal rhythms. In conclusion, we suggest that addressing such mechanisms offers fruitful avenues for fostering more sustainable consumption, compared to dominant approaches that are founded within ‘deficit models’ of action.

This article contributes to the literature on corporate sustainability management by investigating a corporate-led consumer “behaviour change” initiative designed to promote sustainable consumption. This is done through an in-depth longitudinal case study of Procter & Gamble’s low-temperature laundry initiative as it unfolded over a 10-year period to become an industry-wide campaign with broad societal acceptance and institutional support by 2013. The analysis is guided by insights from three prominent organizational theories used in the study of corporate sustainability (stakeholder theory, institutional theory, and the resource-based view of the firm). The case demonstrates that a successful behaviour change initiative involves far more than providing information or incentive for consumers, entailing changes in regulation, technology, organizational identity, mental models, and legitimacy. Procter & Gamble’s management strategy can be viewed as an emergent and open-ended innovation journey that took time, required resources, and involved adjustments in goals as mental models evolved.

The paper makes two contributions to the advancement of the 'circular economy' as a blueprint for a more sustainable society. The first is to highlight the importance of understanding the dynamics of consumption and waste in the domestic sphere. The second is to illustrate two ways in which using insights from socio-technical literature on sustainable consumption, in combination with the sociology of food, could contribute to redressing this shortfall. This includes understanding why people use or consume particular goods or services, and how this might be altered; and what drives the production of waste and the adoption of strategies for its reduction by consumers. We mobilise insights from a socio-technical perspective on consumption, which highlights the importance of everyday interactions between routine activities, mundane technologies and cultural meanings in (re)producing patterns of consumption. These insights are illustrated with reference to domestic food provisioning, using empirical data generated through twenty semi-structured interviews with consumers in relation to meat consumption and thriftiness. Two suggestions for the development of the 'circular economy' to better take account of consumption within the domestic sphere are made. The first is a shift from imagining consumers as 'users' of particular products or services, to conceptualisation as 'doers' of everyday activities. The second is a broadening of the principle of 'eco-effectiveness' to take account for the social value of consumption.

This paper investigates why, how and to what degree supermarkets stimulate upstream eco-innovation in UK milk, beef and bread chains. To answer this question, we aim to enrich the environmental supply chain management literature with insights from innovation studies. The resulting conceptual framework distinguishes three elements: a) motivations for supermarkets to address eco-innovation (internal considerations and external pressures), b) characteristics of supply chains that hinder or enable eco-innovation attempts (e.g. breadth, length, degree of trust), c) mechanisms to stimulate eco-innovation. Regarding this third element, which is our main contribution, we distinguish: 1) economic mechanisms (supermarkets paying farmers more for eco-innovation or imposing eco-performance standards), 2) information exchange and interactive learning in networks (‘innovation systems’), and 3) socio-cognitive coordination through the creation of shared meaning and visions (e.g. roadmaps). We demonstrate the usefulness of this framework with a comparative qualitative analysis of three UK sectors with different degrees of retailer-led eco-innovation: milk, beef and bread. The paper ends with three broader reflections and suggestions for further research.