Practice change is an essential part of improving outcomes and addressing complex challenges in areas such as sustainability, healthcare, and natural resource management. It focuses on how groups, organisations, and sectors learn, adapt, and implement new ways of working over time – through reflective routines, professional networks, peer learning, and shifts in organisational conditions.
Where behaviour change often focuses on influencing individual actions and decisions, practice change operates at the collective level. It asks how the everyday routines, norms, and working patterns of teams, professions, and communities shift – and what enables or constrains that process. Both perspectives are important. Together they help explain how meaningful and lasting change emerges across individuals, organisations, and wider systems.
Social practice theory offers a distinctive lens here, drawing attention to how practices are carried and reproduced through shared skills, materials, and meanings rather than through individual choice alone. The resources below bring together practical frameworks and toolkits alongside this research tradition, offering guidance for practitioners working in settings where the challenge is not changing individual minds but shifting the way work gets done.
Frameworks and practical tools for practice change
These resources offer structured approaches for supporting practice change in organisational and multi-actor settings – from portfolio-based strategies to design-oriented toolkits.
System Change: A Guidebook for Adopting Portfolio Approaches
This 2022 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) guidebook introduces a portfolio-based approach to practice change in complex settings, emphasising sense-making, engagement, and iterative learning over single interventions. Rather than focusing on individual behaviour change, it addresses how collective practices evolve through coordinated action, reflection, and adaptation across programmes and initiatives. The guide is particularly useful for practitioners working in uncertain, multi-actor environments who need to hold learning, judgement, and coherence over time as practices shift.
Change Management Toolkit
Developed by UC Berkeley, this practical guide brings together proven tools and techniques for leading organisational change. It outlines seven key components of effective change management and is organised into four sections: pre-work, managing personal transitions, developing a change plan, and implementation. Designed for anyone responsible for leading a change initiative, the toolkit offers templates, checklists, and guidance to help plan, communicate, and monitor change initiatives of any size.
Design thinking for practice-based intervention: Co-producing the change points toolkit to unlock (un)sustainable practices
Claire Hoolohan and Alison Browne (2020) explore how design thinking and social practice theories can intersect to support sustainability interventions. This paper critically examines key developments in these fields and presents a toolkit for creating sensitive and effective sustainability policies.
Social practice theory – research foundations
Social practice theory shifts attention from individual decisions to the shared routines, skills, and material conditions through which practices are carried and reproduced. These papers provide the research grounding for the practical approaches above.
Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change
Tom Hargreaves (2011) applies social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change, shifting focus from individual attitudes to the collective organisation of practices. This paper highlights the challenges of changing ingrained practices and the opportunities for creating footholds for sustainable change.
Behaviour change and theories of practice: Contributions, limitations and developments
Daniel Welch (2017) argues for the value of a social practice perspective in explaining social and behavioural change. The paper offers novel insights for sustainable consumption, health promotion, and organisational change, focusing on the interplay of practices within broader systems.
Behavioural economics vs social practice theory: Perspectives from inside the United Kingdom government
Sam Hampton and Rob Adams (2018) provide insights from UK Government Social Researchers on the intellectual tension between behavioural economics and practice theory in energy and climate research. This paper highlights the appetite for policy-relevant research grounded in practice theory.
How social practices generate, carry and require knowledge and know-how
Stanley Blue and Elizabeth Shove (2016) delve into how social practices are constituted through elements such as embodied skills, background knowledge, and motivational understanding. This short comment piece highlights the integration of these elements in shaping collective behaviours.
Theories of practice and public health: understanding (un)healthy practices
Stanley Blue, Elizabeth Shove, and colleagues (2014) propose that social practice theories offer an alternative to psychological and structural approaches in public health. The paper suggests rethinking public health policies by focusing on how social practices shape health inequalities and everyday behaviours.
Work on sustainability transitions often involves several connected layers of change. Related pages on this site explore how paradigms and collective identity shape possibilities for action, how values influence behaviour, how behaviour change interventions are designed. For practitioners looking at how teams and networks develop new ways of working together, the pages on Communities of Practice and Organisational learning cover closely related ground.
[* Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash]