>> Work in progess <<
In my quest to try and keep these posts related back to my life, i am this time going to conceder the topics;
(a) What do you think needs to be done to get people to behave more sustainably
AND
(b) Do you think better advertising will be enough to bring about sustainable consumption? What effect does advertising have on your consumption behaviour?
in relation to my work plan for last week.
Monday 19th Oct
10.00-11.00 Camp In meeting
The campaign and outreach teams meet at the beginning of the week, to share what we have been doing, successes and plans for the next week. This process at a functional level helps the different campaign and outreach teams to be aware of what each other and allow links to be explored. At a psychological level it probably helps individuals to feel part of something larger, leading to feelings of empowerment as shared organisational ownership is fostered. (a) Team based environmental citizenship.
11.00-12.00 Go Green Week meeting
Planning meeting for the Go Green week to discus different viral videos. One will be for the network to promote a variety of ideas for activities that groups could run, this will be made out of photo stills and a tongue and cheek date in a comic strip style will add some comedy. This video is heavily targeted at the ‘positive greens’ associated with People & Planet groups. The second video will be aimed at non-engaged students and will advertise the Carbon Blind Date (see earlier post). I will try and incorporate ides from New Rules: New Game (Futerra, 2005), into the second video and continued communication strategy (expect sprawling post on this subject some time soon. (a) Social Marketing (b) Although these are both examples of using advertising to trigger pro-environmental behaviours, I don’t believe that advertising alone can lead to sustainable consumption. Structural changes are needed as well as psychological to move societies to sustainable futures. Advertising can play a role, it was very interesting reading Futerra (2005) ‘Help people to help’ section:
‘People really want to be good, important and useful. Strange but true. Much climate change communications makes people feel bad, irrelevant and useless. Help people to understand (and trust) that they are making a difference.
Climate change isn’t yet in most people’s ‘locus of control’; it feels like a big nasty threat they have no influence over. Until people feel on the inside that changing their behaviour will make a difference, no amount of information, price cuts or haranguing will bring about the change needed.’
Although I agree with the statement in respect to needing to make individuals feel empowered to make change, I think that part of the problem is the lack of action and hypocrisy that people see in government. I don’t think advertising that sustainable consumption without sustainable citizenship can make the changes needed is a positive move.
12.00-14.00 Run through Going Greener Workshop
14.00-18.15 Ring SU contacts
18.15-20.00 Going Greener Workshop for Bath Group
Tuesday 20th Oct
10.00-11.00 University Team Meeting
11.00-18.00 Website development
Wednesday 21st Oct
10.00-11.00 Climate Change Team Meeting
11.00-12.00 1 to 1 Louise
12.00-19.00 Recruit Campaign Advocates
Thursday 22nd Oct
10.00-12.00 Prepare lobbying workshop
13.00-14.30 Deliver lobbying workshop
14.30-17.00 Design brief Carbon Blind date
Friday 23rd Oct
Day of study for sustainable consumption
Friday 16 October 2009
Thursday 15 October 2009
Back from fighting flu to discus how lifting the 'invisible elbow' can make you happy
Once again I apologise to my group who I left high and dry last week, I can only blame it on those dirty freshers from across the country. Although saying that I am going to except partial blame, as I did travel round the country to 6 different freshers fairs.
Now back on the road in the Cambridge SU tonight to sell my version of sustainability to some more students. It was Leeds this morning, where I managed to get a clap. Why am I writing about this on my blog? Is it related?
I think so, but am unsure whether that is just my personal, academic and work lives, merging into a semi-psychotic abstract reality. Also it justifies why I have tried to merge last 3 weeks reading / seminars + personal interests, into this one rambling blog.
I'm going to trace the main contributory of this stream around chapter 1 of Gill's book The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption. But before I start on that I'm going to go back to the relevance of the original comments.
Why Leeds is important. I did two things in Leeds today both of which were relevant to this course and are current topics from the last two weeks.
1) The role of business and sustainability –
I really enjoyed the reading for this and the practical we did in week 2. The balance between engaging with business and the level to do this, before feeling like you are part of an elaborate green-wash, weighted up against gaining access to resources, is some thing that I have considered many times. The reason I say an elaborate green-wash is that I believe there is some time a consus effort to steer opinion for commercial benefit, but also a potential systematic green-wash as a capitalist system incapable of offering 'real' solutions to climate change, tries to find them.
Obviously the whole systematic green-wash is a matter for debate, as shown by our discussions in the practical week 2 and the paper I read but didn't present for week 3; Mol. (2002) Ecological Modernization and the Global Economy.
In Leeds today I did a vox pop video to be shown to a lot of the major suppliers of student unions across the country. Both the content and the context relate. The context part is that what I said may never been shown after it emerged that a CokaCola logo was going to appear on the intro to the vox pop. Urrgh I hear some of the class murmurer. Organizationally for People & Planet this is not a small thing and is enough for us to not use the opportunity to send a message to a large number of Corporations interested in the student market. We don't want to be part of a green-wash and funding a vox pop could well be seen as this, especially when you look at it from a anti-globalisation environmental neo-Marxist position, which many staff members hold (Mol., 2002).
The paradox in my mind and in the organisational position, which makes me feel a bit schizophrenic (not sure how to ever spell this), is the content which is very much from a ecological modernization perspective; constructive engagement. In particular the ongoing engagement with RBS over it's fossil fuel extractive investment mandate. Even though are key message was increasing leverage, this is still a belief that by altering current capitalist systems we can avoid dangerous climate change.
2) I also did a presentation for about 50 environment and ethical issues student union officers from across the UK. The campaign it was on was Going Greener, which has a strong behavioural change element, which is one of the reasons I am on this course. I'll have to go soon and deliver a much shortened presentation on the campaign to sell it again in 10 mins. As part of it I try to discus the utilitarian, social and psychological, and infrastructure of previsions, approaches, and what these might mean to student groups trying to campaign on their campuses. This all leads into chapter 1 of The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption, which I'll return to start rambling about on the train after this talk. It's almost like this course has been planned, wish me luck.
Back from that, were loads of interesting environment groups at Cambridge, but the highlight was the env consultant soc, who do a range of things including an environmental competition between colleges. Playing on the old utilitarian incentive based approach, with a bit of social norming thrown in as a side dish.
Back to Gill's book really enjoyed chapter 1, even wrote in the book in pen, which given the cost must mean I like it. Going to just pick out why some of these pen stained sections of text interested me, rather than rant as I read.
p6 'However, GHGs embedded in what we as a nation consume are far greater than that in what we produce; developed countries export their carbon emissions to developing countries where manufacturing occurs.' This point is really interesting with respect to the strategies we need to employ to reduce emissions, as disused further in the text. It has relevance to the Ditch Dirty Development campaign I have just been taking about in Cambridge, as well, in an extension to what is discussed in the text. The UKs main industry is now the financial services sector, which on paper looks to have low emissions until the embedded are considered.
This point also reminds me of a criticism I had of the Mol. (2002) paper and it's references to studies which showed environmental improvements in the developed western economises, which I presume took no account of the embedded impact associated with products consumed.
p11-12 This section relates to something that I had read in another paper this week and contributed to half of the tittle of this blog entry. It takes about environmental commitment, activism and altruistic motivators, in the context of social and psychological approaches, to behaviour. This section introduces the 'value-action gap' and how that contradicts the more utilitarian approach to predicting behaviour. The paper it links into is Kasser (2009) Some benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and its Role in Psychological Well-Being in the Political Psychology journal.
It starts with a quote from Aristotle
'Which way of life is more desirable – to join with other citizens and share in the state's activity, or to live in it like an alien, absolved from the ties of political society.'
The study investigates levels of self reported well-being using a variety of scales relates to levels of self reported activism, and the causal relation between the two. The study finds a significant relationship between well being and engagement in activism, with activist based activities directly increasing well-being in experimental conditions. In the discussion one of the proposed reasons for this is the ability of activism to bridge this value-action gap and led to lower levels of cognitive dissidence.
Although this paper does have limitations which it ready discuses, on a personal level I can relate to this proposal, that even though I am tied into certain behaviours by an 'invisible elbow' (p19) due to socio-technical regime (p18) around me, through activism I can feel ok about these behaviour personally as I am trying to change them.
Extra reasons for activists to be happy this week, a) new coal fired power station at Kings North cancelled by Eon, b) plans for the third runway at Heathrow also dropped by BAA, and c) The Great Climate Swoop this weekend at Ratcliff on Sour Coal fired power station (Good opportunity to do your reading for the book review with your neck d-locked to something).
Now back on the road in the Cambridge SU tonight to sell my version of sustainability to some more students. It was Leeds this morning, where I managed to get a clap. Why am I writing about this on my blog? Is it related?
I think so, but am unsure whether that is just my personal, academic and work lives, merging into a semi-psychotic abstract reality. Also it justifies why I have tried to merge last 3 weeks reading / seminars + personal interests, into this one rambling blog.
I'm going to trace the main contributory of this stream around chapter 1 of Gill's book The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption. But before I start on that I'm going to go back to the relevance of the original comments.
Why Leeds is important. I did two things in Leeds today both of which were relevant to this course and are current topics from the last two weeks.
1) The role of business and sustainability –
I really enjoyed the reading for this and the practical we did in week 2. The balance between engaging with business and the level to do this, before feeling like you are part of an elaborate green-wash, weighted up against gaining access to resources, is some thing that I have considered many times. The reason I say an elaborate green-wash is that I believe there is some time a consus effort to steer opinion for commercial benefit, but also a potential systematic green-wash as a capitalist system incapable of offering 'real' solutions to climate change, tries to find them.
Obviously the whole systematic green-wash is a matter for debate, as shown by our discussions in the practical week 2 and the paper I read but didn't present for week 3; Mol. (2002) Ecological Modernization and the Global Economy.
In Leeds today I did a vox pop video to be shown to a lot of the major suppliers of student unions across the country. Both the content and the context relate. The context part is that what I said may never been shown after it emerged that a CokaCola logo was going to appear on the intro to the vox pop. Urrgh I hear some of the class murmurer. Organizationally for People & Planet this is not a small thing and is enough for us to not use the opportunity to send a message to a large number of Corporations interested in the student market. We don't want to be part of a green-wash and funding a vox pop could well be seen as this, especially when you look at it from a anti-globalisation environmental neo-Marxist position, which many staff members hold (Mol., 2002).
The paradox in my mind and in the organisational position, which makes me feel a bit schizophrenic (not sure how to ever spell this), is the content which is very much from a ecological modernization perspective; constructive engagement. In particular the ongoing engagement with RBS over it's fossil fuel extractive investment mandate. Even though are key message was increasing leverage, this is still a belief that by altering current capitalist systems we can avoid dangerous climate change.
2) I also did a presentation for about 50 environment and ethical issues student union officers from across the UK. The campaign it was on was Going Greener, which has a strong behavioural change element, which is one of the reasons I am on this course. I'll have to go soon and deliver a much shortened presentation on the campaign to sell it again in 10 mins. As part of it I try to discus the utilitarian, social and psychological, and infrastructure of previsions, approaches, and what these might mean to student groups trying to campaign on their campuses. This all leads into chapter 1 of The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption, which I'll return to start rambling about on the train after this talk. It's almost like this course has been planned, wish me luck.
Back from that, were loads of interesting environment groups at Cambridge, but the highlight was the env consultant soc, who do a range of things including an environmental competition between colleges. Playing on the old utilitarian incentive based approach, with a bit of social norming thrown in as a side dish.
Back to Gill's book really enjoyed chapter 1, even wrote in the book in pen, which given the cost must mean I like it. Going to just pick out why some of these pen stained sections of text interested me, rather than rant as I read.
p6 'However, GHGs embedded in what we as a nation consume are far greater than that in what we produce; developed countries export their carbon emissions to developing countries where manufacturing occurs.' This point is really interesting with respect to the strategies we need to employ to reduce emissions, as disused further in the text. It has relevance to the Ditch Dirty Development campaign I have just been taking about in Cambridge, as well, in an extension to what is discussed in the text. The UKs main industry is now the financial services sector, which on paper looks to have low emissions until the embedded are considered.
This point also reminds me of a criticism I had of the Mol. (2002) paper and it's references to studies which showed environmental improvements in the developed western economises, which I presume took no account of the embedded impact associated with products consumed.
p11-12 This section relates to something that I had read in another paper this week and contributed to half of the tittle of this blog entry. It takes about environmental commitment, activism and altruistic motivators, in the context of social and psychological approaches, to behaviour. This section introduces the 'value-action gap' and how that contradicts the more utilitarian approach to predicting behaviour. The paper it links into is Kasser (2009) Some benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and its Role in Psychological Well-Being in the Political Psychology journal.
It starts with a quote from Aristotle
'Which way of life is more desirable – to join with other citizens and share in the state's activity, or to live in it like an alien, absolved from the ties of political society.'
The study investigates levels of self reported well-being using a variety of scales relates to levels of self reported activism, and the causal relation between the two. The study finds a significant relationship between well being and engagement in activism, with activist based activities directly increasing well-being in experimental conditions. In the discussion one of the proposed reasons for this is the ability of activism to bridge this value-action gap and led to lower levels of cognitive dissidence.
Although this paper does have limitations which it ready discuses, on a personal level I can relate to this proposal, that even though I am tied into certain behaviours by an 'invisible elbow' (p19) due to socio-technical regime (p18) around me, through activism I can feel ok about these behaviour personally as I am trying to change them.
Extra reasons for activists to be happy this week, a) new coal fired power station at Kings North cancelled by Eon, b) plans for the third runway at Heathrow also dropped by BAA, and c) The Great Climate Swoop this weekend at Ratcliff on Sour Coal fired power station (Good opportunity to do your reading for the book review with your neck d-locked to something).
Wednesday 30 September 2009
Sustainable Finance
Thought as people have been reading the WWF's Living Planet Report 2008 they may be interested in finding out some of the campaigning that is going on around some of the issues it raised:
'Action is required urgently. For example, the investment decisions made for the energy sector in the next decade will determine its infrastructure for the first half of the 21st century. To achieve the carbon emission cuts needed to prevent disastrous changes in global temperature, investments must be pulled out of carbon intensive sectors such as the Canadian oil sands, and diverted to cleaner energy solutions.' (WWF, 2008)
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which owns NatWest, is the second largest bank in Europe and a hugely significant private funder of fossil fuel projects. Actively promoting themselves as the ‘Oil and Gas Bank’, they play a crucial role in making some of the most controversial oil and gas extraction projects a reality, from the Niger Delta to the Caucasus, from Angola to Qatar.
See Video
Between 2001 and 2006, RBS provided over $10 billion in loans to oil and gas projects. The embedded carbon emissions resulting from these projects in 2006 were greater than the carbon emissions for the whole of Scotland. Also working as a hands-on partner to the industry, RBS structured the loan agreements and acted as financial adviser on over $30 billion of projects over the same period.
Since the government bail outs with public money RBS is now owned by the tax payer. However, there has been no change in policy and RBS continues to invest in massive fossil fuel extraction. We want RBS to shift its funding away from highly destructive projects such as tar sand extraction to a green new deal. This will help to generate jobs and safe guard our future.
Chanel 4 News
People & Planet, along with campaigning groups the World Development Movement and Platform, have taken The Treasury to court over the RBS bailout. Arguing that they broke their own rules when they allowed RBS to pump public money into projects which are trashing the planet and endangering human rights.
Take action: NOW
Tuesday 29 September 2009
Carbon Capability
This is a slightly rambling discussion inspired by
Carbon Capability: understanding climate change and reducing emissions by Lorraine Whitmarsh, Saffron O’Neill, Gill Seyfang and Irene Lorenzoni, from The Hnadbook of Sustainability Literacy (2009) eds. Arran Stibble
Really interesting concept of Carbon Capability
'People are genuinely carbon capable they will understand the limits of individual action and the need for collective action and other governance solutions. Also, a genuinely carbon capable individual appreciates that there are barriers in current systems of provision which limit the ability of an individual to act, and that much consumption (and hence carbon emissions) is inconspicuous, habitual and routine, rather than the result of conscious decision-making (van Vliet et al. 2005)'
The article has got me thinking about a scheme we are trying to develop at the moment; Carbon Blind Date. The basic idea is to match people by their CO2 emissions for a valentines blind date / speed date. We are currently working on Cilla Black to make a viral video and are hoping to role the events out at universities across the country.
Q: How can the scheme contribute to over coming obstacles to low-carbon lifestyles, which range from insufficient knowledge about effective actions, perceived social inaction and the ‘free rider effect’, inadequate or unattractive alternatives to energy-intensive activities such as driving (Lorenzoni et al. 2007)?
A: On it's own it can't tackle all of these things but it could contribute. In particular the actual event could help with perceived social inaction if the messaging was right (Please comment on what you think this messaging could be). The information could be used to allow more targeted transition projects.
The findings that carbon calculator alone do not have very much effect on behaviour at an individual or household level (Whitmarsh et al., forth-coming). Is this due to lack of use of calculators or their inherent limits? This is pushing me to consider more the impact and relevance of this exercise as more than just a data gathering exercise. In order to address this issue it would could have some way of making people more carbon capable.
Being carbon capable implies knowledge of:
- the causes and consequences of carbon emissions
- the role individuals – and particular activities – play in producing carbon emissions
- the scope for (and benefits of) adopting a low-carbon lifestyle
- what is possible through individual action
- carbon-reduction activities which require collective action and infrastructural change
- managing a carbon budget
- information sources – and the reliability (bias, agenda, uncertainty, etc.) of different information sources; and
- the broader structural limits to and opportunities for sustainable
Q: The blind dating will take place over text messages before the night its self, could carbon capability be woven into this some how?
A: Some aspect seam to fit with what could be done but not all.
The food mention: 'very few people are aware of the significant climate impact of eating meat' is interesting as it fits into what we have found (62% of students don't know meat and dairy has an impact on climate change). This could be a good link into this particular behavior:
-Idea1: Get Cilla to make some lude comment about eating meat and climate change for viral video, not sure if she will go for this.
-Idea2: Could have a bot as one of the contestants in the blind date that makes lude but factual responses.
Information gain in calculator will be useful in developing this idea for the need to have interventions at different scale.
This is still all very information biased. How do you use it to incentivise? What benifits links to this all? is it good to link prizes to campaigning activity?
Maybe getting to meet Cilla for the best answer to the Cutting Carbon Activity or part of it.
comments welcome....
Lorenzoni, Irene; Nicholson-Cole, Sophie and Whitmarsh, Lorraine (2007) ‘Barriers
perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy
implications’. Global Environmental Change, 17, 445-59.
van Vliet, Bas; Chappells, Heather and Shove, Elizabeth (2005) Infrastructures of
Consumption. London: Earthscan.
Whitmarsh, Lorraine; O’Neill, Saffron; Seyfang, Gill and Lorenzoni, Irene
(forthcoming) Carbon Capability: what does it mean, how prevalent is it, and how can
we promote it? Tyndall Working Paper. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research,
University of East Anglia, Norwich.
From Sweden to England
Big action to challenge the structures in Sweden, why do these individuals act as low-carbon citizens? does this mean they are low carbon consumers? how does actions like this effect others personal consumption patterns?
Big action coming up on 17th - 18th Oct the Climate Swoop at Ratcliffe-on-sour, join me for an afternoon and refection on sustainable consumption on the Saturday afternoon from 15.00-17.00 (Phone 0780 156 8782 to help organize this workshop/debate)
Big action coming up on 17th - 18th Oct the Climate Swoop at Ratcliffe-on-sour, join me for an afternoon and refection on sustainable consumption on the Saturday afternoon from 15.00-17.00 (Phone 0780 156 8782 to help organize this workshop/debate)
Why? Here now?
Structures..... Lets start with that but move back to it later.
I am really interested in the psychology of consumption and how this relates to pro-environmental behaviour. I have done quite a lot of personal reading around this subject, so have a rough grounding in the subject that i would like to ingrain more into my neural pathways.
I am also working for People & Planet running their Going Greener campaign which is a mixture of their highly successful Go Green campaign which gave berth to the Green League and the transition town campaign. Would be really good to think through this from a more academic angle, while working on this.
I recently went to a talk by Andrew Darnton a desk top researcher for DEFRA who developed their segmentation model, as part of an LSX event in London, and we talked about campaigning and how this relates to behaviour change, something i have been thinking about for a while. I'd like to conceder the two way relationships and potential interplays between structures and activism.
In the end it was the structures that played a large element in how i came to be doing this course, i did have an element of intention in my behaviour though.....
I am really interested in the psychology of consumption and how this relates to pro-environmental behaviour. I have done quite a lot of personal reading around this subject, so have a rough grounding in the subject that i would like to ingrain more into my neural pathways.
I am also working for People & Planet running their Going Greener campaign which is a mixture of their highly successful Go Green campaign which gave berth to the Green League and the transition town campaign. Would be really good to think through this from a more academic angle, while working on this.
I recently went to a talk by Andrew Darnton a desk top researcher for DEFRA who developed their segmentation model, as part of an LSX event in London, and we talked about campaigning and how this relates to behaviour change, something i have been thinking about for a while. I'd like to conceder the two way relationships and potential interplays between structures and activism.
In the end it was the structures that played a large element in how i came to be doing this course, i did have an element of intention in my behaviour though.....
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