Exploring the everyday energyscapes of rural dwellers in Wales: Putting relational space to work in research on everyday energy use

Abstract

Rural dwellers face a series of considerable, inter-locking challenges in the coming transition to a low-carbon society. As the highest emitters of domestic carbon per head of capita in Britain, understanding how and why rural households use energy in the ways that they do, and how this changes through time, is critical to gaining an insight into the ways in which we might reduce domestic energy demand.Although a plethora of conceptual approaches exists for enriching our understanding of the social drivers of energy use and demand, it is also important to better elucidate processes that give form to lives as lived in relational rural spaces. The article deploys complementary concepts of biography, practice and lived relational space, utilises them as part of a bespoke methodology for studying extended case narratives, and reports original analyses of more nuanced understandings of sense-making about dynamic changes in life processes and lived spaces. Insights are offered into difficult to resolve narrative tensions arising when expectations, uncertainties, aspirations and imaginaries work in a relational way to frame energy use in the present, and when socio-cultural ideals and identity-forming processes manifest in rural dwellers’ energyscapes are involved in the making of the future present.