Abstract
The comfortable perception that global environmental challenges can be met through marginal lifestyle changes no longer bears scrutiny. The cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet, we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes. An appeal to environmental imperatives is more likely to lead to spillover into other pro-environmental behaviours than an appeal to financial self-interest or social status.
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Notes
See http://tinyurl.com/732kea (accessed on 21 January, 2009).
Elsewhere in the Futerra report, the reverse strategy is proposed: “Small behaviours don’t automatically lead to bigger ones, but big and socially visible ones can lead to smaller ones. Fitting an energy-saving light bulb won’t convince people to buy a wind turbine, but a wind turbine on their roof may encourage them to buy the bulb.” (Futerra 2006, p. 12). This seems more likely, as we discuss later (in the section “Frequency of Occurrence: Campaigns to Adopt Pro-environmental Behaviours Which Have Already Reached a High Degree of Social Normalisation Will not Provide a Good Basis for Positive Spillover”).
Defra does not elaborate on the relative difficulty of such “catalytic behaviours,” so it is not clear that they are referring to “simple and painless” steps here. At the time of writing, Defra had yet to identify what such putative “catalytic behaviours” might be (pers. comm., Defra, 15 December 2008).
In discussing some of the effects of cognitive dissonance, it was suggested that people who engage in environmentally harmful behaviours that are difficult to change may also engage in simple and painless pro-environmental behaviour. This, it was argued, may present a means of minimizing the cognitive dissonance that arises from an awareness of the disparity between a person’s expectations of their own ethical behaviour and their actual behaviour. In this section, we discuss a broader tendency that has a similar effect. If people reason that their goal should be to make a fair contribution to addressing an environmental problem, this serves as a guide to the degree of effort they invest in the course of pursuing particular pro-environmental behaviours. Under these circumstances, pro-environmental behaviour is not motivated by an attempt to relieve cognitive dissonance, so much as to “play one’s part” fairly.
When asked recently which sectors would have to do more in order to meet the UK government’s target of an 80% cut in emissions by 2050, Lord Turner (chair of the UK government’s Committee on Climate change) said that aviation was aiming to keep its emissions flat by 2050, which would mean that the rest of the economy would have to make cuts of 90%. (DeHavilland Report, 4 February 2009). In fact, the UK government’s Department for Transport predicts that aviation will account for up to 54% of UK CO2 emissions by 2050 (DfT 2009). Other forecasters predict that this proportion will be far higher. For example, in a report published in September 2006, Cairns and Newson (2006) at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, write, “Even at the lower end of the forecast range, carbon dioxide emissions from aviation are set to reach 17 million tonnes of carbon (MtC) by 2050. The higher end of the range is 44 MtC. Meanwhile, the UK is attempting to limit the carbon emissions of all its activities to 65 MtC by this date. This means that, in order to offset aviation’s emissions, all other sectors of the UK economy would need to reduce their emissions by 71%-87% instead of the currently planned 60% from 1990 levels. There is no sign that this can or will happen: the existing 60% target is already extremely challenging.” (p.4). Note that, since this report was published, the target for UK emissions reductions has been increased to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.
There is a large body of experimental work that serves to demonstrate the relevance of the goals used to frame a particular behaviour for determining the level of motivation an individual experiences to engage in that behaviour. Appeals to extrinsic goals (financial benefit, for example) tend to lead to lower persistence in a new behaviour than appeals to intrinsic values (a sense of connectedness to the natural world or an empathy for people in a drought-stricken country, for example; Vansteenkiste et al. 2006, 2007). The relative benefit of appealing to intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic goals increases for more difficult behavioural choices (Green-Demers et al. 1997). These results, drawn from studies in “self-determination theory”, have important implications for the way in which environmental campaigns are framed (the goals to which they appeal). But these studies, which do not relate directly to spillover, fall outside the scope of this article. See WWF (2008) for a fuller account of the results of studies on the quality of motivation achieved through appeal to different goals.
See http://tinyurl.com/66otnp (accessed 21 January 2009).
Of course, public activism and low-commitment active citizenship will be helpful here as well. In the case of demands for a policy intervention that does not enjoy widespread political support from policy-makers, both public activism and passive acceptance will be necessary. Where that political support is forthcoming, however, it may be sufficient that public acceptance is established. Because passive acceptance will probably be easier to secure than public activism, some environmental campaigners choose to focus particularly on ways in which the former can be generated.
Ed Miliband, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, recently said, “When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960 s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation… Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.” (Quoted in The Guardian, 8 December 2008). See http://tinyurl.com/6c6sjg (accessed 21 January, 2009).
Certainly, as things stand, recent initiatives to remove incandescent lightbulbs from shops in the UK did trigger the reaction, from some quarters, that governments should leave individual consumers to decide what lightbulbs to buy, and drew the wrath of several newspapers: The Daily Mail, for example, ran a headline: “Revolt! Robbed of their right to buy traditional light bulbs, millions are clearing the shelves of last supplies” (The Daily Mail, 7 January 2009, emphasis added).
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Acknowledgements
A previous version of this paper was published as a report in a series produced as part of WWF-UK’s Strategies for Change Project. Copies can be downloaded at www.wwf.org.uk/strategiesforchange. The authors thank David Norman, Folke Ölander, Joe Brewer, Katherine Symonds, Peter Denton, Stephen Fitzpatrick, and Tim Kasser for helpful discussions and for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Thøgersen, J., Crompton, T. Simple and Painless? The Limitations of Spillover in Environmental Campaigning. J Consum Policy 32, 141–163 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-009-9101-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-009-9101-1