The Impact of Social Learning on the Use of IHDs and the Energy-saving Behaviour of Residents Living in a Sustainable Neighbourhood

By using the single representative and revelatory case study of the eSmart display users in the eco-neighbourhood Eikenøtt in Switzerland, this research aims to answer the following research question: What is the effect of the use of IHDs on the energy-saving behaviour of households living in the Eikenøtt sustainable neighbourhood and what is the impact of social learning on this relationship? The rationale behind this thesis concerns the literature gap explaining how smart metering systems can aid the sustainability of eco-districts projects by ensuring that the residents, actually engage in an energy-saving behaviour. Moreover, existing research on sustainable neighbourhood developments argued that it provides a great context where people are expected to exchange pro-environmental norms and values – as the context promotes high social cohesion – and therefore this paper uses Eikenøtt as an opportunity to verify this. In order to do so, theory testing is used to undercover the effect of the of IHDs on the households’ energy-saving behaviour and to look into the moderating effect of social learning in the neighbourhood on the relationship between the use of IHD and the households’ energy-saving behaviour. The households of Eikenøtt having access to the eSmart devices have been sent invites to participate in an online survey and thus this allows to make statistics (via Survey Monkey). Due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the number of valid questionnaires was very limited. However, the results of the statistical analysis – which have been run on the IBM SPSS programme – have shed light on many relationships and trends concerning the concepts investigated. In a first place, the findings indicate that the use of social learning is positively associated with the energy-saving behaviour of the households. In a second place, the analysis does not allow to confirm that social learning has a significant moderation effect on the relationship between the use of the eSmart display and the energy-saving behaviour of the households living in Eikenøtt. Nonetheless, the analysis shows that there is a trend and that the non-significant moderation effect is probably due to the low number of respondents. Furthermore, social cohesion and social learning have been found to be positively correlated and therefore one can argue that this shows the importance of the consideration of public space in the creation (design) of eco-neighbourhoods. To conclude, one should bear in mind that this research cannot be generalized and therefore the findings of this study cannot be assumed to be the same in other contexts.