Strategies for Change
WWF's Strategies for Change project re-examines some of the assumptions that underlie current environmental campaigning, and suggests new evidence-based responses. In particular, the project looks at the importance of collective social values in driving change, and at the ways those values are shaped.
There is a large body of empirical evidence that the values people hold and the goals people pursue are critically important in motivating ambitious change. A lot of current environmental campaigning seeks to identify areas where short-term financial self-interest or the pursuit of social status coincides with environmental aims. But this approach will almost certainly be inadequate to meet the environmental challenges we collectively confront.
Fortunately, there is clear evidence that we can begin to engage with dominant values and sources of identity – and there are strategic interventions that the environment movement can make in order to do so.
WWF’s Strategies for Change project marshals the empirical evidence for a values-based approach to environmental campaigning.
Reports:
Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity
This major new publication, written jointly with Professor Tim Kasser (Knox College, Illinois, and author of 'The High Price of Materialism') examines those fundamental aspects of human identity that operate to frustrate approaches to meeting environmental challenges.
The study suggests that some environmental campaigning currently operates inadvertently to exacerbate these unhelpful aspects of identity. It also points to ways in which environmental organisations could begin to work in order to activate more helpful aspects of identity.
Finally, it highlights new opportunities for collaborations across diverse civil society organisations to begin to address fundamental barriers to delivery on a range of concerns - from biodiversity loss to poverty alleviation, and racism to animal welfare abuses.
The book is freely downloadable:
- Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity. The full book (PDF 700KB)
- Overview document - Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity (PDF 300KB)
Alternatively a hardcopy is available for purchase from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or our distributor, Greenbooks
Weathercocks and signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads
As our understanding of the scale of environmental challenges deepens, so we are also forced to contemplate the inadequacy of the current responses to these challenges. By and large, these responses retreat from engaging the values that underpin our decisions as citizens, voters and consumers: mainstream approaches to tackling environmental threats do not question the dominance of today's individualistic and materialistic values.
Weathercocks and signposts critically reassesses current approaches to motivating environmentally-friendly behaviour change.
Current behaviour-change strategies are increasingly built on analogy with product marketing campaigns. They often take as given the 'sovereignty' of consumer choice, and the perceived need to preserve current lifestyles intact.
This report constructs a case for a radically different approach. It presents evidence that any adequate strategy for tackling environmental challenges will demand engagement with the values that underlie the decisions we make – and, indeed, with our sense of who we are.
Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning
It’s often argued that business, government or non-governmental organisations working for pro-environmental behavioural change should begin by encouraging people to take ‘simple and painless’ steps, which will ‘spillover’ into ever more ambitious – and perhaps more environmentally significant – behaviours. But what does the evidence from social psychology have to say about this strategy?
Simple and painless? examines the evidence on whether or not a reliance on ‘spillover’ is a defensible strategy for environmental communicators and campaigners to adopt.
It concludes that they should not rely upon this approach, but goes on to highlight some of the conditions under which it’s more likely to work.
The Natural Change Project
The Natural Change Project was developed as an innovative response to the growing evidence that current environmental campaigns are not resulting in the depth of behaviour change necessary. Using a pioneering values-based approach to inspire a diverse group of individuals, the project incorporated ideas from eco psychology, personal development, outdoor experiences, mentoring and leadership skills.
Natural Change -psychology and sustainability reveals the process of change that took place for The Natural Change Project participants, the workshop approaches used and makes valuable recommendations for future behaviour change campaigns.
You can...
- Download the report - executive summary and conclusions
- Download the full report
- Find out more about the Natural Change Project
- Request a printed version of the report