Going beyond the ABC of climate change policy
In 2008, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) became the latest body to try to persuade us to live the green lifestyle. Its Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours dealt with lifestyle and behaviour issues in the context of climate change.
Like many other organisations that have tried to promote pro-environmental behaviour, DEFRA's approach in the Framework focuses on ways of persuading individuals to adopt a greener lifestyle and make green their brand of choice. In taking this approach, they have reproduced the limited but familiar vocabulary of the ABC – a language in which A stands for attitude, B for behaviour and C for individual choice. Is this any way to go if the job is to promote social transformation on the scale and at the rate required in response to climate change?
The ABC approach begins with A for Attitude. But to concentrate on moments when attitude makes a difference is to lose sight of the bigger picture. In societies characterised by car use, people drive around not because they want to, or because they have no care for the environment, but because participation in such a society brings with it an unavoidable burden of mobility. In emphasising choice, desire and attitude, ABC obscures the questions that matter, which are about how social obligations and conventions evolve and with what environmental cost.
The system then moves on to B for Behaviour. Here, the familiar idea that attitudes motivate individual behaviour makes life simple. Instil new values and new behaviours will follow. In reality, behaviour change programmes often run into problems. Values don't always translate into action. In any case, many environmentally significant practises are routinised and ingrained. In heating and lighting their homes and in washing and showering as they do, people reproduce expectations that are not theirs alone. In addition, such ways of behaving are often shaped and sustained by the homes in which we live.
Finally, the C stands for Choice. The ABC is not just a theory of change. It is intended to promote action. It defines citizens as consumers and governments as 'enablers' whose role is to induce people to make pro-environmental decisions for themselves. In placing responsibility so squarely on the individual, this approach deflects attention from the many institutions that shape options and opportunities, and which makes some courses of action more likely than others. Thus we no longer take it for granted that our children will go to the nearest school. We expect them to go to the 'right' school, according to an elaborate set of social criteria. This often creates demand for mobility. Likewise, building codes perpetuate the idea that 22°C is the 'right' temperature for a building.
Cycling is another example. Governments want to encourage bike use. But cycling involves equipment such as bikes, clothing and suitable roads, as well as shared experience and competence. None of this has anything to do with individual attitudes. The ABC approach is often apparent in government initiatives, but it is also seen in the logic of the Transition Towns movement. Despite its rhetoric about towns, the focus is still on persuading individuals to change their approach.
Can we go beyond ABC? Disciplines for which social change is core business, including sociology, history, anthropology and geography, are brimming with many more useful ideas from other parts of the alphabet, including systems, transitions, routines, practices and dynamic processes. What would it mean to go beyond the ABC and to exploit concepts starting with letters like S, T, R, P and D?
We don't have to look far to find examples. The idea of transition management has its origins in studies of science, technology and innovation, and in evolutionary economics, history and complexity science. All of these have important and relevant things to say about how social arrangements hang together and how they fall apart. In adopting transition management as part of their National Environmental Policy Plan, Dutch policymakers have created space for thinking about how environmentally problematic ways of life are reproduced and evolve.
Another example is public health, where the concept of an obesogenic or fat-generating environment is used to highlight the role of infrastructures, cultures and institutions. So why not something similar for climate change? Sydney Water has taken just such an approach – thinking of water not as a 'resource' but as the input for human activities, from bathing to gardening. Maintaining a green lawn and keeping clean are very different social practices. The institutions that affect these practices are also different: maybe Boots for the bathroom, but B&Q for the garden. We need to know more about how social, policy and business interests interact in cases such as this. There are also examples closer to home. One is the congestion charge for people driving into central London on weekdays – a measure that changed habits directly and that was again not related to individual attitudes.
The future challenge is to focus on ways of developing environments that favour sustainable ways of life. As well as opening up more opportunities for intervention, such a strategy would break through the conceptual log jam of the ABC, and allow climate change policy to benefit from a much wider range of social science than it does at present.
Professor Elizabeth Shove, ESRC climate change leadership fellow, Lancaster University.
This article originally features in the ESRC magazine Britain in 2010.