Talking habits into action : an investigation into Global Action Plan's 'Action at home' programme

The sustainable development paradigm has focused political and academic attention on the concept of sustainable consumption. As current levels of domestic energy use and waste production in post-industrial countries have been increasingly acknowledged as contributors to detrimental global environmental change, debates have emerged about how best to promote the widespread adoption of patterns of sustainable consumption. National strategies, in countries that include the UK, have been developed to affect changes in consumption patterns. This thesis focuses on the environmental information campaign, one strategy that encourages citizens to adopt environmentally friendly consumption patterns or 'lifestyles'. To date, these information campaigns have been ineffective at encouraging individuals to adopt environmentally friendly lifestyles. This thesis aims to address why this may be the case. It investigates one behaviour change programme called Action at Home. It does so by talking to its participants as they take part in the programme. It investigates the discursive processes Action at Home participants engage in when thinking about making changes to their lifestyles. This thesis is theoretically set within grounded social science debates about how publics relate to the concepts and communications of sustainable development. Findings herein suggest that a constructionist and discursive approach to individual's engagement with sustainable lifestyles information can be helpful in building an embedded model of behaviour change. It situates the adoption of sustainable lifestyles within a 'life politics' project of high modernity, positioning the knowledgeable and political social actor and their lifeworld as central theoretical constructs. It concludes that using distanced and disembedded techniques to question deeply embedded and recursive sets of practices has limited viability as a policy tool, bringing the entire sustainable consumption project into question as a feasible political goal.