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Collective food buying groups, such as community supported agriculture or self-organized citizen groups for delivery of food baskets, have emerged throughout the world as an important niche innovation for promoting more sustainable agri-food systems. These initiatives seek to bring about societal change. They do so, however, not through protest or interest-based lobbying, but by organizing a protected space for learning and experimentation with lifestyle changes for sustainable food consumption and production practices. In particular, they aim to promote social learning on a broad set of sustainability values, beyond a focus on “fresh and healthy food” only, which characterizes many of the individual consumer oriented local food chain initiatives. This paper analyses the governance features of such local food buying groups by comparing 104 groups in five cities in Belgium. We find that the social networking activities of these groups, as compared to the social enterprise activities, have led to establish specific governance mechanisms. Whereas the main focus of the social enterprise activities is the organisation of the food provisioning logistics, the focus of the social network activities is the sharing of resources with other sustainable food initiatives, dissemination of information and broader discussion on sustainability issues. ispartof: Ecological Economics vol:140 pages:123-135 status: published

A crucial argument in the debate around smart meter deployment in the EU is the potential for households to save energy. One strand of research in this field has investigated the effects on household energy consumption of the feed-back provided by smart meters. However, another aspect that deserves attention is the motivation for households to use the feed-back to save energy. This paper explores how the emerging trend of using complementary currencies for sustainability policies could translate into new interventions adapted to the smart meter deployment and capable of promoting more autonomous forms of motivation compared to interventions using official currencies. Three systems designs (rewarding, regulatory and hybrid) are presented and discussed within the framework of self-determination theory. Because the rewarding system S1 can contribute positively people's basic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, it could lead to more autonomous forms of motivation. The conclusions regarding the regulatory system S2 are less clear, although the hybrid variant S3 that integrates mechanisms from the rewarding system into the regulatory system could be perceived as more consonant with people's basic need for autonomy.

The Directive 2002/91/CE on the energy performance of buildings requires that by end 2020, all new buildings within Member States are “nearly zero-energy”. Though this is technically feasible for any new construction, the problem of reducing the energy consumption of the existing building stock seems much trickier. Can or will all owners invest to renovate their houses? Are information and financial incentives sufficient? Will individual cost-benefits or return on investment calculation at micro level be enough to overcome the barriers to renovation?The Smart City Block project aims to promote renovation at the level of a city block. It thus directly tackles the insufficiently explored “meso level” where stakeholders with different motivations should interact to achieve a common goal. This interdisciplinary project proposes a variety of technical solutions including insulation techniques and highly energy-efficient equipment but also exploits energy savings that can only be achieved by behavioural changes related to new living organisations. As the proposed approach cannot be applied systematically to any city block, the first step was to develop a methodology for determining where such a block renovation is feasible, within the 5000 city blocks of Brussels.In order to evaluate the acceptance of households, a survey was conducted on four city blocks in Brussels, representing over 450 households. It was therefore necessary to expose the possible solutions in a comprehensive manner for a diverse set of inhabitants. A list of “elements” (including items such as architectural, building performance, HVAC, common living spaces, equipment and gardens or vegetable garden) was produced by specialists (engineers, architects, urban developers and sociologists). The last section of the paper provides the survey methodology and some early results showing inhabitants low attractiveness of energy saving technologies and limited desire to share energy consuming activities.

The process of deploying smart meters in EU’s households is following its course. Cost-benefit analyses are being carried out in Member States and new Directives are replacing the one that gave the initial impulse. However, throughout this process, smart meters are always presented as a way to reduce customer energy consumption. This makes potential energy savings in households a crucial element in the debate. But what is the rationale to expect energy savings in households and how are those savings evaluated? A major strand of research in this field has investigated to which extent the feed-back provided by smart meters could lead to behavioural changes or investment decisions that could, in turn, lower energy consumption. However, there is another dimension to the matter which has, in our view, not received the attention it deserves. This dimension revolves around households’ motivation to actually use the feed-back and advices provided in order to lower their energy consumption. Besides, how this motivation could be sustained over time is also a crucial issue, as some studies show that energy savings tend to fade with time. This paper is addressing the possibility to use the smart meter infrastructure to motivate households for energy savings. It is centred on the design of innovative policy instruments that couple non-financial incentives (complementary currencies) to smart meters. Indeed, non-financial incentives have specific features in terms of symbolic value, social dimension, limitation of the rebound effect and “green challenge” that could initiate and sustain household motivation over time. A form of regulatory architecture is also explored, as well as the coupling with a market-based financial incentive inspired by the concept of white certificates with households as obliged actors.

Energy savings are required, and behavioural change is a good guarantee for this. This paper presents an interdisciplinary four-step approach towards such energy savings. It is based on two types of monetary instruments (white certificates and complementary currencies), that make use of the smart meter infrastructure as a measurement platform for assessing the realised energy savings. A social component ensures that the system design will be accepted by the public at large. ispartof: pages:1-6 ispartof: Infrastructure Systems and Services: Next Generation Infrastructure Systems for Eco-Cities (INFRA), 2010 Third International Conference on pages:1-6 ispartof: Third International Conference on Infrastructure Systems and Services: Next Generation Infrastructure Systems for Eco-Cities (INFRA) date:Nov - Nov 2010 status: published