To achieve a sustainable future, it is imperative to transform human actions collectively and underlying social structures. Decades of research in social sciences have offered complementary insights into how such transformations might occur. However, these insights largely remain disjunct and of limited scope, such that strategies for solving global environmental challenges remain elusive. There is a need to integrate approaches focusing on individuals and social structures to understand how individual actions influence and are in turn influenced by social structures and norms. In this paper, we synthesize a range of insights across different schools of thought and integrate them in a novel framework for transformative social change. Our framework explains the relationships among individual behaviors, collective actions, and social structures and helps change agents guide societal transitions toward environmental sustainability. We apply this framework to the global wildlife trade—which presents several distinct challenges of human actions, especially amidst the Covid-19 pandemic—and identify pathways toward transformative change. One key distinction we make is between different individual actions that comprise the practice itself (e.g., buying wildlife products; private action ) and those that push for a broader system change in practice (e.g., signaling (dis)approval for wildlife consumption; social-signaling action , and campaigning for policies that end unsustainable wildlife trade; system-changing action ). In general, transformative change will require an integrative approach that includes both structural reforms and all three classes of individual action.

In the pathway toward environmental sustainability, it is important that we understand how individuals can make a difference through diverse types of engagement. Theories suggest that transformative change toward a sustainable future requires individuals to engage in not only private actions (e.g. household energy saving, recycling) but also social‐signalling and system‐changing civic actions (e.g. opinion sharing, voting, petition signing and protesting). Yet, past research on pro‐environmental behaviour has primarily focused on private actions, while overlooking individual contributions to facilitating widespread change through civic actions. We use the exotic pet trade as a focal case to understand how individuals may act to promote environmental sustainability through different patterns of engagement and what factors might explain these distinct patters of action. Results from an online survey about behavioural intentions in the United States (n = 527) revealed three types of individual action that could transform the exotic pet trade. Private actions clustered separately from civic actions. Within the category of civic actions, a distinction emerged between lower social‐commitment actions and higher social‐commitment actions, based on the perceived level of social engagement and personal efforts involved. We also found that each type of action was associated with unique factors, highlighting the importance of attitudes, perceived social norms, and relational values for variously promoting individual engagement among the U.S. public. Our findings suggest that these distinct types of action should be treated differently when designing future wildlife conservation campaigns and behaviour change interventions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

To achieve a sustainable future, it is imperative to transform human action and underlying social structures. Decades of research in social sciences have variously offered insights into understanding how such bold transformations might occur. However, these insights remain disjunct and of limited scope, providing only partial explanations on the processes of change required for solving global environmental challenges. Reductionist approaches tend to focus on micro-level changes within the individual, largely assuming that social structures and norms would shift incrementally as a result of individual behavior change. On the other hand, holistic, social structural approaches tend to describe how macro-level changes occur, while generally glossing over individual differences in terms of values, motivations and personal characteristics. There is an urgent need to integrate these two approaches in order to understand how individual actions influence and are in turn influenced by social structures and norms. In this paper, we synthesize a range of insights across these two different schools of thought and integrate them in a novel framework for transformative social change. One key distinction we make to bridge individual and collective perspectives lies between individual actions that comprise the practice itself and those that push for a broader societal change in practice. Our conceptual framework explains the interconnected relationships among individual behaviors, collective actions, and social-structural arrangements and suggests how these interdependent processes can together instigate both behavioral and societal change. We apply this general framework in the context of global wildlife trade and identify a variety of pathways towards transformative change.