Thoughts on Social Practice and Climate change
Social practice theory (SPT) in this context in short is the idea of shifting the focus from an individualistic perspective of mitigating climate change to the larger system of everyday practices. It focuses on how these practices can be implemented/normalized so that it “recruits” people to a more environmentally conscious way of life.
For example, biking in Bangalore, India is considered an inferior form of transportation to the car, since the car is more expensive, travels faster and block out a lot of the pollution in the air. However, a growing number of middle class people are choosing to bike because they believe it allows you to exercise while also contributing to the mitigation of climate change. They are focused on removing the stigma around around the practice of biking in hopes that more people will hop on board. An important way they try to achieve this is through the delineation of a more aesthetically pleasing and better built bike. This works to remove itself from the image that biking is only for poor people and encourages more middle/upper class people to switch from the automobile to biking. In addition, this group of activists are very active on social media, promoting their cause through Facebook groups and t-shirts/helmets that they wear when biking. The government is then forced to construct or widen bike lanes due to the increased demand, this allows more middle-class bikers on the roads, which works as an advertising agent to recruit more people into biking. This feedback look continues to build upon itself until the cultural norm of biking as a lowly form of transportation is completely removed thus reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere while also promoting the physical health of Bangalore.
We set out in our class to carry out an exercise on identifying change points in our everyday lives where we can interject and target the overarching social practice that dictate our action. For this my group identified the lack of recycling for plastics as something we want to see change. One of the main things we came up with is establishing more recycling facilities and making them better known to the public. This is because 80% of the group did not even know where they could take the plastic bottles of the household to properly recycle them. In fact, some places have recycling depots in grocery stores so that people can easily recycle items and use that money to buy their grocery in one trip. We spent 20 minutes coming up with various ways in how we might be able to implement this and wrote it all down on a jamboard, but after that, class was over and nobody bothered to revisit the board or take any action. Revisiting the board now, I am reminded of how complex the world is and how difficult it is for a single person to make any meaningful impact on the larger systems of practices that dictate our lives. Perhaps this is an avenue that deserves more personal thought and research as I’m sure it has been done before.
