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Environmental leapfrogging and everyday climate cultures: sustainable water consumption in the Global South

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Abstract

The pursuit of ‘everyday climate cultures’ can mean many things, including reductions in the resource intensity of everyday life. This paper considers efforts to influence current and future patterns of water use in the Global South. This is a significant challenge for environmental policy and for companies that seek to reduce environmental impacts during the use phase of their products. Challenges such as these often give way to debates about the potential for developing countries to bypass resource intensive phases of development and ‘leapfrog’ directly to more sustainable pathways. This article contributes to the literature on environmental leapfrogging by applying social practice theory to better understand the significance of users and ‘lifestyles’. Drawing on a research collaboration with Unilever—involving a rapid review of relevant evidence—the analysis considers mobile (cell) phones as an exemplar of ‘user-led leapfrogging’. A number of lessons are drawn out of this case study that inform thinking about the task of leapfrogging to more sustainable patterns of water use in the Global South. Attention is paid to the adoption and appropriation of products, the broader societal impacts of new technologies, and alternatives to the logic of efficiency. Crucially, it is argued that technologies are limited in their ability to steer processes of positive change and that attention must be paid to existing cultural patterns, ways of doing things, and social structures. The conclusion reflects critically on the concept of environmental leapfrogging, the merits and limitations of social practice theory, and the broader implications of the analysis for understanding everyday climate cultures.

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Notes

  1. Theories of practice are multiple, so too are their applications to environmental sustainability (see for example Lavau 2013 and Yates et al. 2017). We use ‘social practice theory’ specifically to signal an approach that takes its cues from Elizabeth Shove and colleagues.

  2. Including a distillation and translation of this body of work for an interdisciplinary and stakeholder audience.

  3. See Farrell et al. in this issue for a critical discussion of corporate (and Unilever) engagement with sustainable living initiatives in the Global North.

  4. Our case study does not include a discussion of smartphones. The reason for this is that the ‘leapfrog’ to mobile telephony pre-dates the advent of the smartphone. Readers interested in more contemporary accounts of smartphone use in the Global South are referred, for example, to Madianou and Miller (2011).

  5. Note that the mobile phone literature does not say (nor did we expect it to say) anything about environmental leapfrogging.

  6. Although it should be noted, their introduction has been market-led in some contexts (for example China).

  7. They may, of course, also have unintended positive outcomes that are created by users

  8. Also environmental ‘rebound effects’ as technologies drive standards, more frequent laundering and increased water/energy demand (cf. Shove 2003)

  9. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2008/mar/14/switchtolowflowshowerheads (accessed 28/03/2018)

  10. Other versions of practice theory are perhaps more adept at dealing with culture and inequality (see Evans 2018)

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Evans, D.M., Browne, A.L. & Gortemaker, I.A. Environmental leapfrogging and everyday climate cultures: sustainable water consumption in the Global South. Climatic Change 163, 83–97 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2331-y

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