Shaping our future

Behaviour change The opportunity Enable people to live more sustainably and improve their quality of life – supporting people who come together to make lifestyle changes that improve their quality of life and help tackle climate change in the home, at work and in their travel.

Significant behaviour change will be an essential ingredient in achieving the UK’s climate change targets. People need to be provided with opportunities and incentives to change their behaviour in ways that also improve their quality of life. For example, changes in energy behaviour at home have the potential to reduce energy use by up to half, reduce costs for householders and lessen the need for more costly approaches to saving energy.38 Many policies require a certain degree of behaviour change in their delivery strategies and a wider spread commitment to changing behaviour will help to achieve climate change goals and build public acceptance of national level actions and policies on climate change. The third sector is very well placed to inspire, promote and support behaviour change. As a trusted messenger the sector can offer tailored and compelling communication about sustainable lifestyles that resonate with a broader range of people in ways that government campaigns do not.39 Behaviour change is relevant to many parts of this report. This chapter considers the third sector’s unique contribution, an overall framework for influencing behaviour and, in particular, the third sector’s contribution to changing energy behaviour.

6.1 The third sector’s role Despite the contribution that behaviour change is expected to make to achieving climate change targets, the government itself is not best placed to directly inspire behaviour change. This is partly due to their perceived distance from people’s daily lives and a relative lack of trust in them as communicators, compared to sources such as third sector organisations.40 At the national level, government is well placed to provide information campaigns and encouragement to action. But these alone are known to be insufficient, as they do not overcome the information-action gap.41 Successful behaviour change strategies need to enable, engage, encourage and exemplify, as expressed in Defra’s ‘4e’s model’ (see figure 3).

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Shaping our future

Published on Mar 9, 2010

Green Alliance

Shaping our future is the product of a joint government and third sector process to explore how to mainstream action on climate change across the diverse third sector. The task force that wrote the report brought together four government departments: Defra, DECC, the Office of the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office and Communities and Local Government, as well as an interesting mix of 16 third sector leaders. There is an imperative for the third sector to act, as climate change will affect many causes that the sector holds dear, and threatens the progress made in reducing inequalities and poverty. But Shaping our future focuses on the opportunities that tackling climate change offers: the opportunity to show leadership, to build resilient communities, to develop and provide sustainable public services, to secure green jobs and to encourage and support individual and community level behaviour change.