Affording Sustainability: Adopting a Theory of Affordances as a Guiding Heuristic for Environmental Policy

Abstract

Human behavior is an underlying cause for many of the ecological crises faced in the 21st century, and there is no escaping from the fact that widespread behavior change is necessary for socio-ecological systems to take a sustainable turn. Whilst making people and communities behave sustainably is a fundamental objective for environmental policy, behavior change interventions and policies are often implemented from a very limited non-systemic perspective. Environmental policy-makers and psychologists alike often reduce cognition ‘to the brain,’ focusing only to a minor extent on how everyday environments systemically afford pro-environmental behavior. Symptomatic of this are the widely prevalent attitude–action, value–action or knowledge–action gaps, understood in this paper as the gulfs lying between sustainable thinking and behavior due to lack of affordances. I suggest that by adopting a theory of affordances as a guiding heuristic, environmental policy-makers are better equipped to promote policies that translate sustainable thinking into sustainable behavior, often self-reinforcingly, and have better conceptual tools to nudge our socio–ecological system toward a sustainable turn. Affordance theory, which studies the relations between abilities to perceive and act and environmental features, is shown to provide a systemic framework for analyzing environmental policies and the ecology of human behavior. This facilitates the location and activation of leverage points for systemic policy interventions, which can help socio–ecological systems to learn to adapt to more sustainable habits. Affordance theory is presented to be applicable and pertinent to technically all nested levels of socio–ecological systems from the studies of sustainable objects and households to sustainable urban environments, making it an immensely versatile conceptual policy tool. Finally, affordance theory is also discussed from a participatory perspective. Increasing the fit between local thinking and external behavior possibilities entails a deep understanding of tacit and explicit attitudes, values, knowledge as well as physical and social environments, best gained via inclusive and polycentric policy approaches.

Fostering Children’s Connection to Nature Through Authentic Situations: The Case of Saving Salamanders at School

“…Instead the frame views socio-cultural influences to shape, rather than to prevent, how we select and use the information that we receive about the world’s true qualities. Affordance theory (Gibson, 1979; Kaaronen, 2017) and situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), specifically fit well with such a social-ecological approach.…”

“…For example, environmental activists report greater connectedness with nature compared to college students, suggesting that connectedness with nature may be related to pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors (Bruni and Schultz, 2010). However, recent studies indicate that the attitude–action gap is still an unresolved scientific problem in sustainability planning and management (Sörqvist, 2016; Kaaronen, 2017; Linder et al, 2018). …”

“…Even if the socio-cultural aspects of the environment always have been present in affordance theory (Gibson, 1979), it has of late been brought more to the foreground (Raymond et al, 2017). Affordances are dynamic and coupled human-environment relations (Kaaronen, 2017), where behavior is probabilistic and actualisation of affordances may occur when the right social circumstances are present (Clark and Uzzell, 2002; Kyttä, 2004). A situated learning approach is used below to explore how affordances are related to connection to nature and learning about nature.…”

A Theory of Predictive Dissonance: Predictive Processing Presents a New Take on Cognitive Dissonance

“…If the opportunities for action, or affordances, of face-houses are unclear and previously unencountered (i.e., the prior probability for a face-house is low) it makes very little practical sense to perceive a face-house. Affordances here and later in the present text are defined as the relations between abilities to perceive and act and features of the environment, or in other words, the actionable opportunities afforded to a capable organism by the environment (Chemero, 2003, 2009; Kaaronen, 2017; also Gibson, 1979; Reed, 1996; Heft, 2001). …”

“…CD is arguably one of the more relevant cognitive phenomena in understanding the roots of the global ecological crisis. This is due to the apparently prominent role that CD plays in the so-called attitude–action gap in environmental psychology (see Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002; Kaaronen, 2017; Uren et al, 2018) as well as climate denialism and other ecological “denialisms” (Lorenzoni et al, 2007). Here, it seems, dissonance arising between generative models and sensory input (e.g., dissonance between attitudes and action) is explained away by mechanisms such as delegation of responsibility, distancing, apathy, denial, and active avoidance of contradictory information (Stoll-Kleemann et al, 2001; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002).…”