IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

It is important to identify these problems; however, simply removing these barriers is insufficient to improve the success of these policies. Across each of these issues, there is underlying and flawed tendency within UK energy policy to frame homeowners as rational actors, whose engagement with policy is based on the right financial offer.3 Researchers have noted the limitations of this framing but it is still necessary to develop an alternative approach to understand how people make decisions about their homes. In a recent paper,4 we propose a social relations approach to challenge the framing of the rational-actor conceptualisation of homeowners and the factors that shape decision making. This article summarises our findings and highlights the implications for retrofit policy.

Our approach frames research into energy demand and its use through the lens of relational sociology. Hargreaves and Middlemiss identified three categories of social relations that informed energy consumption in homes: relations with friends and family; relations with agencies and institutions; and relations associated with identity.5 Our interviews with homeowners, which we summarise below, confirmed that these categories played an important role in informing people's decisions to undertake work on their homes.

However, social relations associated with money were also critical and carry implications for how homeowners will engage with incentives or grants to retrofit their homes. For example, Zelizer has argued that social relations determine what people are happy to pay for, who will pay, and how much people are willing to pay.6 People also ‘earmark’ money differently depending on its origin and how its meaning is negotiated within the household. For instance, interviewees generally showed a strong aversion to using loans to pay for renovations, preferring to use savings or unexpected windfalls, such as inheritances. By adding social relations associated with money to the three categories that Hargreaves and Middlemiss identified, we are better able to understand the dynamics that shape how people really make decisions about their homes – a combination of relational factors, and rational incentives. We also begin to explain their limited interests in some financial incentives and therefore how energy policy might be adapted to accelerate domestic retrofit.

Social relations associated with friends and family played an important role in determining when people got work done on their homes, and the types of work that they undertook. For instance, one interviewee noted that they needed to wait to do the renovations as they had young children and they wanted to avoid the disruption. Meanwhile, other interviewees noted that they wanted to create a space that better suited their family and socialising with friends. Critically, even when people noted practical concerns around aging fittings or improving insulation, they still underlined how the works would

The ways in which social and political issues are framed matters. The will to exert control over a public narrative to build consensus around a proposed course of action is apparent across the political spectrum, and in countries around the world.1

We do not yet know if the photograph of Mesut and Irmak will help stimulate increases in humanitarian aid or shift public policy. However, we do have evidence of the impact of other iconic photographs. When I saw the image from Turkey, I was immediately taken back to another tragic photograph from that country, that of lifeless 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015.4 That image, taken by Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir, immediately captured the humanitarian tragedy of the European migration crisis in a way that the millions of words and thousands of images that had previously been produced could not. The effect was immediate. Donations to charitable organisations drastically increased and, in the UK at least, the dominant discourse in the media shifted markedly. For example, on 17^th April, 2015, British tabloid The Sun published an article proclaiming: “What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country… Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money. Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches”.5 While extreme, this sentiment was by no means unusual with politicians also using terms like “swarms” and “hordes”6 to describe those supposedly threatening our lifestyles – and even our lives. The Daily Telegraph, another right-leaning newspaper, though less sensationalist than The Sun, reported similar concerns, suggesting that “local services are said to have reached ‘breaking point’”, as the number of asylum-seeking children in Kent county council's care rose from 368 in March to 6297 and reporting: “Channel chaos as migrants exploit strike to get to Britain”.8

What is interesting in the case of Alan Kurdi was how a single photograph could shift the framing of a national conversation, and potentially government policy, so quickly. It also illustrates how social and political issues are not objective facts but are rather layered with meaning by those who have designs on particular outcomes. Therefore, to understand how frames are used to shape particular outcomes, we need to appreciate that the framing of issues is usually constituted by an ongoing struggle for power - and heavily influenced by the media that are able to help contour support for a particular position.

It is also important to understand how the ideological stance of different media organisations will shape how they frame an issue. Janina Klein and I explored these ideas in a study that examined the response in the UK to the Alan Kurdi photograph.11 What we found has clear implications for those interested in the ways in which policy constru