What role does Entertainment-Education play in the adoption and maintenance of sustainable behaviours: a case study of reusable coffee cups in millennials

ABSTRACT

Entertainment-Education interventions can be influential communication strategies to help facilitate audiences to live more sustainable lifestyles. Understanding the process of influencing viewers’ behaviour is essential to further design and enhance Entertainment-Education interventions. This current research uses focus groups to explore the role the first season of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television series, War on Waste, played in encouraging an uptake in reusable coffee cup behaviour in Melbourne’s millennial generation (people born between 1982 and 2000). The results indicate the investigative style, local context and joint-learning experience were all elements that promoted reusable coffee cup behaviour. Millennials described this behaviour as being more widely adopted – compared to other behaviours shown in War on Waste – because it aligned with their lifestyles, was considered ‘easy’ and projected their environmental values. This case study aims to provide practitioners with a useful framework that can be applied to broader Anthropogenic issues to generate behaviour change at scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Entertainment-Education
• sustainable behaviour
• pro-environmental behaviour
• behaviour change
• environmental education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr Kim Borg for initial feedback and valuable comments on an early version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was conducted as part of a Masters by coursework at RMIT University and received no funding.