The role of households in sustainability transitions: An infrastructural inversion

• Household members engage in user-driven infrastructuring, which is the development, upgrading, and maintenance of the part of their possessions which provides the infrastructure of their everyday life. • Household members’ infrastructuring is ambivalent when it comes to the acquisition of more sustainable household technologies. Sustainability potentials may be realised but they can also be “infrastructured away”. • Household members negotiate infastructural entanglements when developing their household. • Household members potentially engage in collective, local redefinition of standards of normality. • Households are a focal point for discussions of production and reproduction in society, which has far-reaching consequences for the role of households in sustainability transitions. Starting from the observation that households are infrastructurally entangled, this conceptual article investigates the role of households’ agency in relation to socio-technical sustainability transitions. It is argued that when household members engage in infrastructuring activities such as developing and maintaining their household they perform practices that are relevant for sustainability transitions on a societal scale. Three forms of this kind of infrastructural household agency are identified: Households appropriate sustainable innovations, they establish new standards of normality both within and in relation to other households and they engage in experiments with sustainable infrastructural futures by reframing the role of households in society in fundamental ways.