Climate Change and Society: The Chimera of Behaviour Change Technologies

Abstract

Our dependence on energy from fossil fuels is causing potentially disastrous global warming and posing fundamental questions about the commensurability of consumer capitalism and a sustainable society. UK and Scottish governments have taken a lead in climate change legislation intended to avoid worst-case scenarios through low carbon transition. There are, however, considerable uncertainties about whether individualized, market-driven, materialistic societies can manage such radical transformations. Policies to cut household emissions focus on behaviour change through social marketing and incremental modifications to consumption. This technocratic model produces very little societal change, and seems likely to be self-defeating. The framing of the problem as one of behavioural adjustments to individual self-interest obscures alternative understandings of society as a collective accomplishment. Through simultaneous 'knowing and not knowing' about unsustainable consumerism, a behavioural model allows governing to proceed, while marginalizing awkward questions about the contradictions between economic growth and low carbon transitions.

Neither Fair nor Unchangeable But Part of the Natural Order: Orientations Towards Inequality in the Face of Criticism of the Economic System

“…Feygina (2013) suggests that people's disregard of the environment, despite their dependence on it, is based on a historical development of ideology and society which expresses itself on a psychological level: ''…attitudinal and motivational responses to social systems and hierarchies that underlie the perpetuation of social injustice appear to also account for ongoing environmental destruction and resistance to pro-environmental change'' (p. 364). Psychological research has sometimes been criticised for focusing on individuallevel engagement (for example, promoting individuals' pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour with respect to recycling, domestic energy conservation and use of public transport) while ignoring systemic factors such as the economic growth motive (Shove, 2010;Webb, 2012) or subsidies to the fossil fuel industry (Carrington, 2015). Since SJT offers a perspective on attitudes towards structural level change, its relevance to the environmental debate merits more attention.…”

“…However, Klein (2014) points to the failure of market mechanisms such as ''cap and trade'' and argues that neither technological ''solutions'' nor transitions to greener consumer lifestyles alone will address the root problem that is causing environmental destruction (see also, e.g. Shove, 2010;Webb, 2012). The fundamental issues are how-or whether-constant economic growth can (or should) be sustained in a world with finite ''resources'' and which rights, laws and power relations are in place to allow access to land and water to some people and not to others.…”

Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health

“…307 However, it has been science, rather than social science, that has underpinned climate change communication and policy development. 308 There is as yet little evidence on how to change behaviours that contribute to climate change, 309 but taking broader evidence on the determinants of behaviour and behavioural change, four themes stand out.…”

A Social Engagement: How Ecopsychology Can Benefit From Dialogue With the Social Sciences

“…This is something of a caricature of conceptualizations of the social world in psychologies of the environment. The psychological mainstream, as far as it is distinguishable, also now acknowledges that psychological research needs to provide a much more nuanced understanding of the multiple and interdependent behavioral decisions involved in patterns of consumption and environmental destruction, even if government policy is slow to catch up (Webb, 2012). However, common practice subsequent to this tends to acknowledge social/ cultural factors as ''variables'' in mapping ''drivers'' of human behavior, with the individual as the prime unit of analysis (Steg and Vlek, 2009;Swim et al, 2011).…”