The ripple effect: Institutionalising pro-environmental values to shift societal norms and behaviours

Abstract

Contemporary markets and societal norms externalise many ecosystem services important for a sustainable future. A range of external legal, market, social protocol and other mechanisms, referred to as 'societal levers', constrain or otherwise influence the behaviour of resource managers, and the expectations and assumptions of the society within which they operate. These 'societal levers' have progressively institutionalised evolving societal values, influencing markets and other choices. We use the STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental and political) framework to explore case studies of societal transitions, analysing how emergent concerns become shared and ultimately transformed into 'levers', shifting societal norms. Emerging concerns become influential only when they are shared across societal sectors, and when broader implications are realised across multiple dimensions of the STEEP framework. We propose and advocate use of a 'ripple effect' of values as a means to direct and accelerate the pace at which environmental concerns shape mainstream societal norms and structures, and become institutionalised in the form of 'societal levers'.

Governance explains variation in national responses to the biodiversity crisis

“…Moreover, the direction of predictors of environmentalism can vary across countries with different income levels (Nawrotzki 2012) or within countries over time (Kahn 2002;Franzen & Vogl 2013). Furthermore, it appears that environmental concern does not always predict pro-environmental behaviour (Schultz et al 2005;Steg & Vlek 2009;Heberlein 2012;Everard et al 2016).…”

The self‐sabotage of conservation: reply to Manfredo et al.

“…Broader social and institutional change is precisely the focus of the literature on sociotechnical systems transformation, which Manfredo et al cite on page 772-780 (Geels 2002). Similarly, Everard et al (2016) recently highlighted how key individuals or small-scale initiatives can scale up to precipitate broader socialization and institutionalization of values, leading to shifts in norms and practices. Indeed, such a ripple effect has been well observed in business, where strategic leadership leads to sustained cultural change in organizations (e.g., promoting the value of workplace safety in Alcoa by chief executive officer Paul O'Neill [Lagace 2002]).…”

“…Because of the Conservation Biology Volume 31, No. 6, 2017 potential for ripple effects (Everard et al 2016), such interventions can lead to improvements within existing system states and may help create niches (sensu Geels & Schot 2007) where more fundamental societal change is possible. Pragmatic interventions operating within existing value systems and cultural contexts therefore can be part of the solution, but their limitations need to be recognized.…”

Resource Recovery from Waste: Restoring the Balance between Resource Scarcity and Waste Overload

“…Individual concerns, perceptions and knowledge of these actors need to be joined up through social debate, proposing increasingly coherent changes, linking concerns and solutions across multiple interests through social learning, leading to the construction of shared values, problem perceptions, and solution spaces that can function as 'windows of change' for radical transitions towards a CE [11,51]. Participatory governance is a known approach for such transition processes seeking to solve complex environmental problems involving multiple actors at multiple scales [52].…”