Beyond individual behaviour change: the role of power, knowledge and strategy in tackling climate change

Abstract

Individual behaviour change is fast becoming a kind of ‘holy grail’ to tackle climate change, in environmental policy, the environmental movement and academic literature. This is contested by those who claim that social structures are the main problem and who advocate collective social action. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to better understand why environmentally concerned citizens choose one of these two types of engagement. Our focus is on the role of experiences of and/or convictions about power in shaping this choice. Within the framework of an explorative qualitative study, we engaged in in-depth interviews with 12 young environmentally concerned citizens. On this basis, five main findings are elaborated. Firstly, powerlessness is shown to be a crucial experience, whatever the respondents’ engagement. Secondly, ‘strategy scepticism’ seems to be a more important obstacle for engagement than ‘climate scepticism’. Thirdly, many respondents express significant resistance towards being ‘conditioned’ by awareness-raising campaigns. Fourthly, a ‘gap’ is observed between respondents’ analysis and their strategy proposals. Finally, we underscore another important gap between concrete and abstract levels in respondents’ discourses. All these findings disclose paradoxical aspects of the role of power in shaping the concerned citizens’ engaged choices.

Keywords:

• pro-environmental behaviour
• environmental activism
• power
• governmentality
• gramsci
• knowledge
• strategy

Notes

1. The first was the slogan of a Greenpeace campaign to stimulate people to choose a renewable energy provider (Greenpeace 2009), the second was the main slogan of an action organized by a couple of thousand activists against the climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 (ClimateJusticeAction 2009).

2. In its list of important barriers for pro-environmental behaviour, the DEFRA report (2008, 35) mentions the following examples: (1) ‘Scepticism around the climate change debate and distrust of both government and industry. For example, about a quarter don’t believe their behaviour contributes to climate change.’ (2) ‘Disempowerment, as there is a disconnection between the size of the problem (Global Climate Change) and the individual’s contribution (e.g. turning off lights) and a sense that individuals cannot make a difference. About one third said it was not worth Britain acting, as other countries would cancel its actions out. More than half claimed if government did more, they would too’. As such, experiences of powerlessness are psychologised. They are not taken seriously, but reduced to a feeling, a false impression, that has to be taken away. Instead of understanding the choice not to engage in pro-environmental behaviour as being based on an analysis of the problem and on a strategic judgement, it is approached as a behavioural problem. Authors such as Redclift and Benton (1994, 7–8) sharply reply to this with statements such as: ‘One of the most important insights which the social scientist can offer in the environmental debate is that the eminently rational appeals on the part of environmentalists for ‘us’ to change our attitudes, or lifestyles, so as to advance a general ‘human interest’ are liable to be ineffective. This is not because (or primarily because) ‘we’ are irrational, but because the power to make a significant difference, one way or the other, to global, or even local environmental change is immensely unevenly distributed.’

3. The fact that all respondents were more or less in the ‘green scene’ (Horton 2006), is one of the limiting factors of our sampling. It is surely possible that a sample of, say, governmental officials, with no connection to this green scene, would give different results.

4. With ‘extreme cases’ we mean people who adopt a quite radical ideological position and/or go quite far in their own environmental commitment. For example, a few respondents went amazingly far in changing their individual behaviour: they took a shower only once a week and only with cold water, they stopped visiting their parents who serve non-organic food for dinner or they lived without heating even during winter months. Others were so committed to organising actions, to demonstrating or to giving lectures that their personal lives and health suffered from it. Ideologically, some respondents were very liberal, while others were eco-primitivist or eco-communist.

5. It is important to mention that respondents knew that the study was about their commitments and motivations with regard to climate change, but not that ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’ were crucial concepts in our approach. Therefore, it is not the case that they mentioned these terms so often because they would have known this was our core question.

6. We have translated the Dutch interviews into English, trying to remain as close as possible to the original, spoken language. The names of the respondents, corporations and organisations have been modified, for reasons of anonymity.

7. If we put a word or sentence in double quotation marks, it means that we quote a respondent directly.

8. With the term ‘direct’ we refer here to the idea of Tim Jackson (2005, vi) that we quoted in the introduction, namely ‘the need for policy to […] attempt to affect individual behaviours (and behavioural antecedents) directly’. Concretely, this means using role models, social pressure or connoting the desired behaviour to positive feelings of freedom, friendship or sex, as is also done in the advertisement industry.