Sammendrag
It is increasingly recognized that climate change mitigation will require fundamental changes to societal systems, also known as societal transformations. This thesis explores local perceptions of and engagement with climate change and sustainability in everyday life to contribute to a better understanding of what shapes public acceptance or resistance towards transformative change policies. Based on an understanding that resistance to policy is often shaped by factors specific to local contexts, I explore perceptions of and engagement with climate change and sustainability among residents in Aurskog-Høland, a rural municipality in Norway, through qualitative interviewing. Applying social practice theory, it was found that the informants’ perceptions of climate change and their perceived ability to perform sustainability in everyday life was shaped by relationships of enablement and constraint found in the nexus of practices that prescribe everyday activities. The analysis shows that most informants believed that climate change is happening, that it is caused by human activity, and that something needs to be done to deal with the crisis, conceptualized as a ‘dominant narrative’ on climate change. Furthermore, the findings indicate the existence of a ‘collective project of sustainability’, which represents collective ideas and goals oriented towards making changes towards sustainability in contemporary ways of living. However, the analysis shows that actual sustainability performances in everyday life was constrained by factors relating to the material structures in the built environment that shape how people engage with the physical world, conventions and norms that define what is socially expected and accepted, and conflicting understandings and motivations related to climate change and sustainability that shaped what sustainability practices make sense for the informants to perform. Finally, the thesis discusses how these findings reveal potential and barriers for transformative pathways across the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation, showing how social practice theory can be applied to identify and discuss the interactions between these three spheres.