Energy Cultures Framework

The Energy Cultures Framework is an interdisciplinary tool for understanding why people, households, and organizations use energy as they do, and how that behaviour might change. Developed by Janet Stephenson and colleagues at the University of Otago and published in Energy Policy in 2010, it models energy behaviour as the dynamic interaction of three elements: cognitive norms (what actors believe and expect about energy), energy practices (what they actually do), and material culture (the technologies, buildings, and appliances they possess). These three reinforce one another, tending to lock an actor into a stable 'energy culture,' and they are shaped by external influences such as prices, policy, infrastructure, and markets that lie beyond the actor's immediate control. The framework was designed as a pragmatic bridge between psychological models that emphasize attitudes and sociological practice theories that emphasize routines and materials. Its purpose is both to explain entrenched energy behaviour and to identify where interventions can break a self-reinforcing pattern. It is widely used in energy-policy and behaviour-change research.