Guide

How is the UK government promoting sustainable behaviour?

How is the UK Government Promoting Sustainable Behaviour? Download PDF

The UK gov­ern­ment has made a number of attempts to develop an under­standing of British pro-environmental atti­tudes and beha­viours. For example, there have been peri­odic sur­veys of public per­cep­tions of cli­mate change and sus­tain­able beha­viours con­ducted by the Department for Transport (e.g., DfT, 2010), while Defra (the Department for Farming and Rural Affairs) has developed a ‘frame­work for sus­tain­able beha­viours’ which iden­ti­fies dif­ferent ‘seg­ments’ of the pop­u­la­tion based on their atti­tudes and behaviours.

More recently, Defra has pro­duced a strategy for influ­en­cing sus­tain­able beha­viours based on this frame­work. The Defra and Department for Transport doc­u­ments are worth reading, to get a sense of how the gov­ern­ment of an indus­tri­al­ised nation is thinking about how to influ­ence their cit­izens’ beha­viour. However, prob­ably the most sig­ni­ficant work that the UK gov­ern­ment has pro­duced comes from the Cabinet Office, which con­tains a group known as the Behavioural Insight Team.

The Behavioural Insight Team was announced in 2010 to provide an evid­ence base for gov­ern­ment pro­grammes that aimed to influ­ence indi­vidual beha­viour. Governments are often reluctant to openly attempt to influ­ence people’s values, and the Behavioural Insight Team draws heavily on work by two beha­vi­oural eco­nom­ists (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008), which is seen as offering a ‘value-neutral’ approach to beha­vi­oural change.

Often referred to col­lo­qui­ally as the ‘Nudge’ team (after the title of Thaler & Sunstein’s book), the focus of the ‘Nudge’ approach is on shaping the con­text in which decisions are made, rather than expli­citly aiming to per­suade or dis­suade people from enga­ging in a par­tic­ular beha­viour (Involve/DEA, 2010). Thaler and Sunstein describe their approach as focusing on ‘decision archi­tec­ture’, but it shares a great deal of common ground with the prin­ciples of social mar­keting – the sys­tem­atic applic­a­tion of mar­keting con­cepts and tech­niques to achieve spe­cific beha­vi­oural goals rel­evant to the social good.

There are two reports that show most clearly how the UK gov­ern­ment is seeking to influ­ence sus­tain­able beha­viours. The first intro­duces an approach called ‘MINDSPACE’ (Dolan et al, 2010), which is an acronym for the nine prin­ciples that the Cabinet Office con­siders to be crit­ical for influ­en­cing indi­vidual beha­viour. The nine prin­ciples are: Messenger (people are heavily influ­enced by who com­mu­nic­ates inform­a­tion); Incentives (our responses to incent­ives are shaped by ‘heur­istics’ such as strongly avoiding losses); Norms (we are strongly influ­enced by what others do); Defaults (we ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options); Salience (our atten­tion is drawn to what is novel and seems rel­evant to us); Priming (our acts are often influ­enced by sub-conscious cues); Affect (our emo­tional asso­ci­ations can power­fully shape our actions); Commitments (we seek to be con­sistent with our public prom­ises, and recip­rocate acts) and Ego (we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves).

These nine prin­ciples are designed to be applic­able to a range of domains – not just sus­tain­able beha­viours. Although the nine prin­ciples remain within the bound­aries of social mar­keting – the lim­it­a­tions of which are dis­cussed here – the MINDSPACE approach is quite a soph­ist­ic­ated and evidence-based strategy for impacting sus­tain­able behaviours.

Using these prin­ciples, the Behavioural Insight Team pro­duced a report looking spe­cific­ally at house­hold energy beha­viours, and has applied a wide range of beha­vi­oural eco­nomic evid­ence to the design of the ‘Green Deal’ – a flag­ship policy aimed at improving the energy effi­ciency of up to 14 mil­lion homes in the UK. For example, drawing on the ‘Incentives’ prin­ciple, low-interest loans are being offered to house­holds to remove the bar­rier of paying ‘up-front’ for things like home insu­la­tion. And in col­lab­or­a­tion with the energy com­pany Opower, inform­a­tion about neigh­bours’ energy usage will be made avail­able on people’s energy bills (based on the ‘Social Norms’ principle).