Event: Environmental attitudes and actions in context

I’m going to this workshop as part of the Australian Psychological Association’s Conference in Hobart at the end of September 2008. It sounds good.

Environmental attitudes and actions in context

Uzzell, D.
Saturday 27 September, 8.30am – 4.30pm

This workshop will provide a review of research methodologies and findings on environmental behaviour change, including social marketing techniques, identity theory and social norms. There will be interactive sessions to collect data from workshop participants on their perceptions of environmental issues, followed by analyses of this material using co-orientation analysis, discourse analysis, and Boal’s conflict resolution techniques to understand socially situated environmental attitudes and practices. The workshop will especially interest psychology researchers; psychologists working in policy settings (e.g. national, federal and local government); psychologists working on behaviour change programmes; and doctoral students especially from environmental, social and political psychology.

Weathercocks and signposts

This paper reviews the value of two approaches to behaviour change for activist and non governmental organisations – the authors are from WWF’s strategies for change project. The two approaches explored are a recently very popular (social marketing) based approach versus an alternative approach more common in politics(framing / identity and values based).

I have been thinking that its implications for environmental NGOs (whom it is written for) are a bit different than its implications for environmental practitioners more broadly (who have different levels of resources, and often different goals).

A friend who sent it to me earlier is one with whom I’ve had many passionate arguments with about whether or not its most important to go for values or behaviour change.

The worry for me of this paper for activist organisations in particular is that this may be the rationalisation for moving away from ‘client’ based engagement that people uncomfortable with marketing based approach have been waiting for (starting where the people are at, rather than where you are at, and working from there is what I love about marketing approaches). The danger here is of change agents ending up to talking about ‘to themselves, about themselves’ if you go on the Jason Clarke principle that change agents are fundamentally different from the broader population. Certainly research from the NSW ‘who cares’ series suggests that people who integrate knowledge, attitudes and behaviour consistently are far from a majority in the population (see the market segmentation in the 2006 report).

While I believe the authors of ‘weathercocks’ make a genuine effort to be broad in their consideration of the contributions of marketing based approaches, they do state an intent to make an argument for a shift away from them for environmental NGOs. They emphasise the need for different strategies for their sector, but I unconvinced that they’ve really added anything new to a well rounded approach to behaviour change for everyone else with this critique , and may be neglecting its contribution to their own sector – there are more holistic approaches to environmental change based on marketing than the ‘foot in door’ approach

Maybe this isn’t such a big deal – I can’t get away from the thought that its really about points of entry into the immensely complex task of intentional social change – it follows that different players would have different strengths and opportunities to contribute. But I do hope that a new values based approach for NGOs flowing from this way of thinking is engaging of the broader populations values, rather than back to the one way self expression of some environmental change approaches….