The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from “top-down” approaches in low-carbon municipalities to “bottom-up” approaches in intentional communities. This paper compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies. Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents’ daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening current policy strategies.

Since the emergence of transdisciplinary research, context dependencies, innovative formats and methods, societal effects, and scientific effects are key aspects that have been discussed at length. However, what is still missing is an integrative perspective on these four aspects, and the guidance on how to apply such an integrative perspective in order to realize the full transformative potential of transdisciplinary research. We provide an overview of each aspect and highlight relevant research questions that need to be answered to advance transdisciplinary research.

Work organizations that implement sustainability strategies can create supportive environments for the performance of sustainable routines. For instance, employers have the capacity to influence sustainable lifestyles of their employees by increasing spillover effects from workplaces to home settings. These circumstances provide a potential pathway to change routinized activities in different domains. We critically review sociological and psychological literature on practices of environmental relevance to better understand these spillover effects. These disciplines have contributions to make but are on their own insufficient to determine trajectories toward more sustainable (consumption) routines. This analysis thus considers both structural and individual dimensions of sustainable lifestyles. To advance analyses of spillover of routinized activities, we present a framework that combines theories of practice concepts (meanings, competencies, and material aspects) and principles of identity process theory (continuity, distinctiveness, self-esteem, and self-efficacy). Our framework aims to identify and assess spillover effects from the workplace to domestic settings. We show that work organizations can systematically provide the elements necessary for the performance of sustainable practices. The framework underpins methodological instruments to explain spillover effects (of sustainable consumption), equally encompassing individual and structural aspects.