The development of energy literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviour) and agency of New Zealand children (age 9-10) were investigated through thematic and exploratory statistical analyses of interviews (October 2011-April 2012) with 26 children, their parents and teachers, focus groups and photo elicitation. The children knew that electricity costs money and saw it as a finite resource. Half could name an energy source but few knew of any associated environmental issues. Most of the children had a positive attitude towards saving electricity, but did not intend to save energy to a further extent (low intended behaviour) and were not influencing their families to conserve energy (low agency). The children were learning about energy informally from a variety of sources, and acquired their attitudes mostly from talking to their parents. The results highlight the need for energy education for citizenship at school and conversations about energy both there and at home.
Objective: To analyse local government (LG) policies concerned with creating a healthy, sustainable and equitable food system.Methods: All relevant policies on LG websites were identified and analysed against a framework of 34 recommendations for LG action on food system issues.Results: A total of 13 of 207 (New South Wales 128, Victoria 79) LGs had dedicated food system policies. Most actions on food system issues were in general (non-food specific) policies. MostLGs acted on food safety, sustainable local food production, food waste, drinking water access and food system-related education. Few used economic measures to support the consumption of healthier foods, restricted unhealthy food advertising, developed and implemented dietary guidelines in LG-managed settings or influenced the opening of unhealthy/healthy retail food outlets.
Conclusions:LGs undertook a range of actions relevant to creating a healthy, sustainable and equitable food system. Strategic opportunities for LGs include regulating the sale and marketing of unhealthy food and ensuring policy coherence.
Implications for public health:LGs can be supported to act further on food system issues, including through 'joined-up' state and federal policies. Further research should address how relevant LG policies can be developed, implemented and monitored effectively to address the complex challenges created by contemporary food systems.
Socialisation into electricity consumption usually occurs during childhood, but little is known about the socialisation processes involved. Here, we use interviews and focus groups to investigate how nine to ten-year-old children from New Zealand learn about, and consume, electricity in their homes. The children used a wide range of electrical appliances and engaged in different energy saving behaviours, often without being conscious of their implications. Control over appliances and learning through modelling, reminders and rules helped to socialise children into saving electricity, while nagging and inconsistent behaviours from parents were counterproductive. Conversations about energy were uncommon, but helpful for creating consciousness about energy use. We discuss the need for a more structured approach, through developing energy literacy, in order for children to use their agency, surpass their parents' level of energy saving practices, and stabilise energy saving behaviours through life. In addition, we provide recommendations on how parents, schools, the media and product developers can help in this process.
Amidst calls for paradigm shifts in environmental scholarship, we track an emergent literature on how environmental values, knowledge and behaviour (EVKB) change (or not) with the migration process. We focus on the role of Majority World migrants to the Minority World. Large-scale survey research into EVKB is beginning to consider both ethnicity and migration history as important variables, but tends to leave the concepts of environment and environmental behaviour unexamined. Western EVKB indicators thus tend to be universalized rather than understood as themselves culturally specific. An emergent literature attempts to improve both quantitative and qualitative research on EVKB by broadening the conceptualization of environmental behaviour to include the practices of Majority World migrants. Those studies throw new light on the process of acculturation as having disruptive or solidifying potential for sustainable practices. We summarize four implications for future research. There is a need to go beyond western logics in research design and method. Straightforward assumptions about the 'pro' in pro-environmental behaviour need to be challenged. Cases of EVKB's persistence post-migration and positive influence on the broader population should be sought out and examined. The migration process provides real-time experiments in enacting alternative worlds.
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