Understanding the embeddedness of individuals within the larger system to support energy transition

CO₂ emissions need to be reduced drastically to fight climate change and minimise the further increase of average global temperatures. The decarbonisation of the energy system aims at reducing CO₂ emissions and is thus urgently needed. This transition is facilitated by inter alia switching to renewable energy sources and...

The Good Life and Climate Adaptation

The need to adapt to climate change brings about moral concerns that according to ‘eco-centric’ critiques cannot be resolved by modernist ethics, as this takes humans as the only beings capable of intentionality and rationality. However, if intentionality and rationality are reconsidered as ‘counterfactual hypotheses’ it becomes possible to...

Open Building and User Agency: Early and Contemporary Experiments in the Netherlands

This chapter discusses the notion of ‘Open Building’ through its conceptualisations and implementations in the Netherlands since the 1960s until today. It focuses on the place of dwellers’ agency in the development of residential open buildings to investigate the potential of users’ empowerment. <br/><br/>The ‘Open Building’ approach synthesises...

Human-Machine Partnerships in the Future of Work: Exploring the Role of Emerging Technologies in Future Workplaces

Technologies in the workplace have been a major focus of CSCW, including studies that investigate technologies for collaborative work, explore new work environments, and address the importance of political and organizational aspects of technologies in workplaces. Emerging technologies, such as AI and robotics, have been deployed in various...

Public agency and responsibility in energy governance: A Q study on diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible...

Inclusion and Resilience in the Bioeconomy

New technological developments such as CRISPR-Cas, advanced genetic sequencing and the digitalization of agriculture offer promising prospects to realize the potential of a sustainable bioeconomy. At the same time, enormous challenges abound such as the pressure on biodiversity and the associated risk of pandemics, climate change and the ever...

The governance of attractive public transport: Informal institutions, institutional entrepreneurs, and problem-solving know-how in Oslo and Amsterdam

Public authorities are under mounting pressure to promote more sustainable urban mobility, including a modal shift from cars. With an empirical focus on Oslo and Amsterdam metropolitan areas, this paper analyses how the interplay between formal frameworks, informal institutions, and individuals’ agency can contribute to making public transport...

Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency

Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g.,...

Analysing the role of visions, agency, and niches in historical transitions in watershed management in the Lower Mississippi River

This paper analyses five major transitions in watershed management in the Lower Mississippi River from the early 19th century to the present. A conceptual framework is developed for analysing the role of visions, agency, and niches in water management transitions and applied to a historical case on water management in the Lower Mississippi...

Five things you should know about cost overrun

This paper gives an overview of good and bad practice for understanding and curbing cost overrun in large capital investment projects, with a critique of Love and Ahiaga-Dagbui (2018) as point of departure. Good practice entails: (a) Consistent definition and measurement of overrun; in contrast to mixing inconsistent baselines, price levels,...

Assemblage Theory, Ecology and the Legacy of the Early Garden City

This study examines ideas that were drawn together by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) in his formulation of the Garden City concept originally published in 1898 in his influential book Tomorrow; A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and subsequently developed at the first Garden City at Letchworth in 1903. Howard readily acknowledged his influences, which...