Dr Claire Hoolohan leads the Tyndall Centre’s Accelerating Social Change theme, and is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure (Civil Engineering) at the University of Manchester. Claire’s research specialises in sustainable consumption, environmental policy, and social practices – with a particular focus on water, mobility and diet. This research contributes to designing policies and strategies that engage meaningfully with demand to foster rapid systemic change towards a sustainable society.
Claire has authored more than 30 research papers and book chapters related to sustainable consumption, water demand, climate change policy, water-energy nexus, and resource management. Her publications explain the lack of society wide action on sustainability as a failure to mobilise change in social practices (in organisational and household settings) and emphasizes the importance of reframing consumption in planning, policy and practice so that the dynamic and emergent qualities of everyday life are better recognised.
Claire collaborates with industry, NGOs and public sector partners to understand consumption, reimagine policy and intervention, and develop intervention pathways that reflect the complex reality of people’s everyday lives. Recent projects include:
- Enabling Water Smart Communities – An Ofwat Innovation Project that aims to understand the intersections between water and housing to unlock new opportunities to deliver integrated water management. With core partners: Anglian Water, ARUP, United Utilities, Thames Water, CIWEM and University of East Anglia.
- ESRC Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation – CAST is a global hub for understanding the systemic and society-wide transformations that are required to address climate change. We aim to understand how society can live differently – and better – in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid and far-reaching emission reductions. The centre involves researchers at the University of Bath, University of East Anglian, Climate Outreach, Cardiff University, and partners including Possible, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and Anglian Water.
- Water Practices Training Toolkit – This toolkit gives water industry professionals a practical understanding of how social practice theories can enhance their ability to forecast and manage household water demand. It trains participants to think critically of how their approach to demand forecasting and management could be enhanced by using social science methodologies.
- Northumbrian Water – A long-standing partnership with Northumbrian Water currently funds two PhD Research projects exploring water demand in high-use households, how high consumption practices could change, and what might be done to reduce demand in these homes.
- Change Points – Change Points is a toolkit that supports intervention reframing, designed for use by professionals and practitioners interested in going beyond behaviour change to explore the systems of practices, diversity and connections that sustain unsustainable ways of living, and develop initiatives to engage with these. Change Points has also been translated into pedagogic case study in a Routledge Handbook for Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption.
