Kersty Hobson

Cardiff University | CU · School of Geography and Planning

The current enthusiasm for the circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direc...

Community initiatives are often charged with scaling-up: growing, deepening their impacts, and seeding off new projects. The desire to scale-up comes from both within the community initiatives themselves, and is also encouraged by all levels of policy, from local government, to national and international frameworks such as the IPCC. This paper adds...

Circular Economy frameworks have become central to debates and interventions that aim to reduce global resource use and environmental despoilment. As pathways to both systemic and micro-scale transformations, there remain many challenges to making Circular Economy actionable. One such challenge is facilitating the emergence of the ‘circular consume...

The current enthusiasm for circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direction...

There is now no doubt that current global production-consumption-disposal systems are threatening the fundamental conditions of existence on this planet. In response, the pressing need for total system transformation has gained civic and political traction, feeding into long-standing debates and interventions that are aimed at recalibrating prevail...

Circular Economy (CE) is now a key governance framework that aims to reconfigure how value is extracted from resources. Despite its widespread uptake, CE commentary to date tends towards descriptive and/or celebratory. In response, in this paper I outline some ways that environmental politics researchers have much to contribute to CE research, argu...

Debates about the ‘Circular City‘ have underscored the need to rethink consumption practices within urban spaces. This intervention explores these arguments, and suggests that some research and interventions to date have under-played the relationship between unsustainable consumption practices and urban spatial forms, drawing on work into mobile ph...

Purpose Although Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) is a growing field of inquiry and intervention, to date, there has been a dearth of engagement between this field and critical social scientists interested in questions of the societal impacts of goods and services. In response, this paper is written from the perspectives of two human geographers...

This paper describes the challenges faced, and opportunities identified, by a multidisciplinary team of researchers developing a novel closed loop system to recover valuable metals and reduce e-waste, focusing on mobile phones as a case study. This multidisciplinary approach is contrasted with current top-down approaches to making the transition to...

Analyzing the spillover effects of environmental interventions is vital for understanding how they contribute to broader societal transitions towards or away from sustainability. Past research analyzing spillover effects has produced inconsistent results, which we argue is in part due to its assumption that social life consists of rational and auto...

Of late, policy and research attention has increasingly focused on making the Circular Economy a reality. A key part of this agenda is the creation of Sustainable Product Service Systems (SPSS) that meet consumers’ needs whilst lessening negative environmental impacts. Although the SPSS literature has grown recently, key aspects require further exa...

Why the devil does not have the best tunes: a response to Verissimo & McKinley - Kersty Hobson

In the UK ‘low carbon’ community groups and partnerships (LCCGPs) have flourished in recent years, with sectors such as community energy receiving increased national policy attention. Whilst such attention aligns LCCGPs with agendas such as ‘New Localism’ and climate change mitigation, other modes of local socio-environmental change are advocated a...

The rapid turnover in consumer electronics, fuelled by increased global consumption, has resulted in negative environmental and social consequences. Consumer electronics are typically disposed of into UK landfills; exported to developing countries; incinerated; retained in households in a redundant state; or otherwise 'lost' with very few being rec...

Heightened concerns about long-term sustainability have of late enlivened debates around the circular economy (CE). Defined as a series of restorative and regenerative industrial systems, parallel socio-cultural transformations have arguably received less consideration to date. In response, this paper examines the contributions human geographical s...

In the UK, there now exist hundreds of low-carbon community groups (LCCGs) that aim to decrease collective resource consumption and/or generate renewable energy through diverse social and environmental interventions. These groups have in recent years become the subject of political attention and funding schemes, underpinned by beliefs that LCCGs ar...

Although reducing levels and impacts of contemporary consumption and production has been a pivotal socioenvironmental goal for decades, global resource use continues to grow rapidly, particularly across the Asia-Pacific region. Responses such as the '10 Year Framework of Programmes on Consumption and Production Patterns' (10YFP)-an outcome of the 2...

Scepticism about climate change now appears a pervasive social phenomenon. Research to date has examined the different forms that scepticism can take, from outright denial to general uncertainty. Less is known about what climate sceptics value and believe beyond their climate change doubt, as well as how "entrenched" such beliefs are. In response,...

Debates about how to foster green/environmental citizenship have been central to environmental politics research in the past few decades. While a great deal of this work draws its central tenets from liberal political theory more recently researchers have adopted broadly post-structural analytical frameworks to explore how diverse forms of (environ...

{textlessptextgreatertextless}br/textgreaterPublic deliberative platforms have been argued as potentially beneficial in fostering adaptive capacity to respond to climate change. However, little is known about the veracity of such claims, and indeed how deliberation and adaptive capacity can and do intersect. In response, this paper reports on findi...

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other...

Amongst social and political researchers, as well as diverse policy actors, debate has of late grown around the role deliberation can and could play in addressing contemporary social, political and environmental issues. Substantial conceptual and empirical concerns remain about this ‘deliberative turn’, including the strictures of achieving ‘true d...

The "deliberative turn" in green political theory and applied environmental decision-making is now well-established. However, questions remain about the applicability of its concepts and methods to non-Western or "nonmodern" contexts, to use a term from Gupte and Barlett's 2007 article in this journal that is the stimulus to this article. In such p...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

Although some still claim them as purely technological and economic concerns, climate change and sustainability present profound challenges to all levels of practice, from international governance institutions to domestic day-to-day habits. This diagnosis has become increasingly emphasised in environmental governance debates, which raises questions...

This paper is positioned within on-going debates about the expansion and re-theorization of political geography's ambit. It argues that animals could and should be included as subjects within sub-disciplinary research. Whilst political ecologists regularly employ animal conservation case studies to detail the complexities of struggles over resource...

Domestic eco-efficient technologies, such as recycling bins and compact florescent light bulbs, are integral to the eco-modernisation project. To date, however, little research has examined their role in the production of ‘sustainable citizens’. In response, this paper explores the productivities of commonplace domestic objects. It draws on qualita...

Human geographers’ research into lay responses to burgeoning environmental issues has highlighted their mediated and contingent constitution. Situated within the discipline's cultural turn, this work has challenged prevailing informational and cognitive approaches to sustainability. In doing so, however, potentially informative concepts and finding...

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to q...

Human geographers have explored at some length the discourses and subject positions implicated in the recent rise of ‘environmental responsibility’. Assigning it either as an individual disposition enacted in various spaces, a performative ‘othering’ tool, and/or a form of ecological governmentality, these debates have said little about the role of...

Assessing the social risks associated with climate change requires an understanding of how humans will respond because it affects how well societies will adapt. In the case of rapid or dangerous climate change, of particular interest is the potential for these responses to cross thresholds beyond which they become maladaptive. To explore the possib...

Analysis of proposed moves towards a more "open" Singaporean society must have as foundation detailed, qualitative explorations of ongoing socio-political practices and relations, This paper details such research undertaken with Singaporean environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to examine their actions, motives, and impacts on the pol...

In November 2002, a group of Singaporean activists established a group called The Working Committee 2 (TWC2) to advocate for the rights of foreign domestic workers in Singapore. By limiting both its lifespan and the scope of its activities, the TWC2 avoided the requirement that all NGOs formally register under the Singapore Registrar of Societies....

 Asia-Pacific cities are experiencing substantial environmental problems, which require innovative policy approaches. One newly emergent policy strand is that of ‘sustainable consumption’. This approach aims to reduce environmental degradation by encouraging all consumers to adopt more environmentally friendly modes of behaviour, especially those l...

Asia-Pacific cities are experiencing substantial environmental problems, which require innovative policy approaches. One newly emergent policy strand is that of 'sustainable consumption'. This approach aims to reduce environmental degradation by encouraging all consumers to adopt more environmentally friendly modes of behaviour, especially those li...

The project of “sustainable consumption” encompasses broader concerns about how individual well-being and quality of life have been superceded by the quest for sustained economic growth. In 1999, the current UK Labour government revised their sustainable development approach, conceptually placing “people at the centre” and arguing for holistic stra...

Researching a broad array of protest forms offers valuable insights into social change. One such unusual form includes protests against tax law rulings made by the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Across Australia thousands of taxpayers invested in ‘tax effective schemes’ in the late 1990s. However, by 2000 each owed on average AUS$75,000 as a result o...

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high-income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumpt...

Despite occupying a central place in the sustainable development paradigm, calls for individuals in high-income countries to adopt patterns of sustainable consumption have failed to gain ground in the past decade. The low uptake of public messages that emphasise links between the environment and the home are caused by a plethora of 'barriers to act...

Sustainable consumption is a key concept in the sustainable development paradigm, which calls for individuals in high-incomes countries to consider, and take action on, the environmental impacts of their household consumption practices. Within recent international policy framings, sustainable consumption is part of an efficiency-focussed rationalis...

This chapter deals with the current global levels of domestic energy consumption and waste production that have been acknowledged as important contributors to detrimental environmental change. Political and academic interest in this component of sustainable development implementation stimulates debates in post-industrial nations concerning the soci...

This paper examines change 'champions' in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Specifically, it explores why certain ATO staff members have become the champions or advocates of the ATO Compliance Model, a tax compliance innovation introduced into the ATO through collaboration with researchers at the Australian National University. It seeks to unde...

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...