Climate Change and Society: The Chimera of Behaviour Change Technologies

Climate Change – Cause for Societal Concern

Modern capitalism, and its forms of technical knowledge and organization, is fundamentally geared to accelerating consumption of energy from fossil fuels. The dynamic of a globalizing, rationalizing, market economy of production and consumption, from food and water to transport and tourism, relies on ever-increasing supplies of coal, oil and gas, in a self-perpetuating process of expansion. But the resulting scale of carbon transfer to the atmosphere, combined with deforestation, is causing rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and global warming, with potentially disastrous impacts on the ecosystems on which life depends (Davis et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2009). Current concentrations of greenhouse gases are without precedent in human history, and are accompanied by progressive transformation of landscapes, degradation of ecosystems, acidification of oceans and species extinctions (UNEP, 2009). Such is the extent and rapidity of change that modern societies are considered instrumental in a new phase of Earth’s evolution, described by geologists as the ‘Anthropocene’. While climate science is a science of uncertainty, recent observations have continually exceeded worst-case scenarios, and evidence has proved robust in the face of intense scrutiny. Risks of non-linear change cannot be dismissed: past episodes of rapid increases in atmospheric carbon have been associated with temperature rises of 5–8 degrees centigrade and abrupt changes in climate, land and water resources. Societies would face major social breakdown, radical loss of life and potential large-scale conflict due to collapsing socio-technical infrastructures, lack of shelter, food and water (Diamond, 2005; IPCC, 2007; UNEP, 2009; UNHDR, 2007/8). All of this brings into sharp focus enduring sociological questions about whether consumer capitalism, with its recurring crises, its externalizing of costs, and its dependence on increasingly specialized technological solutions, is inherently unsustainable: ‘a parasitic form of social arrangement which may stop its parasitic action only when the host organism is sucked dry of its life juices’ (Bauman, 1993: 215).

Inter-state negotiations have sought means to mitigate climate change, but the key multilateral agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, has proved ineffective (Prins et al., 2010). The UK has played a prominent role in international policy, and the UK and Scottish governments have introduced ambitious Climate Change Acts (2008 and 2009 respectively) intended to reduce carbon emissions radically. So far, however, the UK record is one of limited change: the territorial emissions account shows a decline of 15–16 percent relative to 1990, but prior to 2002 this resulted largely from industry closures and off-shoring of energy-intensive manufacturing (Helm et al., 2007). Emissions increased after 2002, despite the introduction of a UK Climate Change Programme in 2000, and decreased only with the onset of recession. Measures of the ‘carbon footprint’ of UK consumption (which includes data on carbon embedded in imported products and their transport) show emissions increasing by 19 percent since 1990 (Helm et al., 2007), and suggest that per capita emissions are around twice the level reported in the territorial account.

This article offers a sociological critique of the consumer society model which informs domestic policy for reducing carbon emissions. A political-economic settlement designed to increase capital accumulation through deregulated markets and accelerating consumption results in reliance on tools for individual behaviour change. This is at best extremely limited as a means of engendering sustainable consumption, and at worst self-defeating. Questions of power and collective responsibility are marginalized, and the contradictions between neo-liberal capitalism and sustainable consumption are obscured.

Neo-liberal Capitalism, Consumerism and Climate Change

Over the last 30 years, neo-liberal political-economic thinking has dominated Anglo-American capitalism, with measures to stimulate every conceivable form of market activity in the name of efficiency, economic growth, and individual freedom and well-being through ever-increasing consumption of a proliferation of goods and services (Stiglitz, 2010; Urry, 2010). The notion of the market is valorized as the appropriate basis for all transactions, to the extent that it becomes the default prescription for social exchange of any kind (Harvey, 2005). Society is reduced to the sum of rationally self-interested individual choices, each seeking to maximize short-term gain. Prioritizing economic growth and consumerism as the central organizing principles of society has resulted in debate about climate change being couched predominantly in the terms of a calculative economics. Prominent opponents of mitigation, such as former US President George W. Bush, have argued that measures for transition to a low carbon society damage economic growth, which is construed as an unquestionable public good.

Governments seeking increased growth have drawn back from market regulation and collective welfare, in favour of macro-economic steering of deregulated financial markets on the one hand, and micro-economic stimulation of consumer-driven growth through low-cost credit on the other (Giddens, 2009; Jackson, 2009). The doubling of the global economy since 1990 has been accompanied by a rise in carbon emissions of around 40 percent (Jackson, 2009), and further degradation of ecosystems on which the poorest populations depend. The scale of the crisis brought about by the expansion of debt has been evident since the 2007 collapse in financial markets (Stiglitz, 2010), with rising levels of inequality, and threats to food, water and energy security. No alternative paradigm has displaced neo-liberalism, however, and its doctrines continue to underpin the policies of the UK and many other governments.

Two main approaches characterize policy for transition to a low carbon society, each extending the idea of the self-regulating market to the environment: macro-economic instruments are intended to price carbon through a cap and trade market, while micro-economic techniques are deployed to encourage ‘pro-environmental’ consumer choice. The primary instrument of macro-economic climate governance for the UK is the EU Emission Trading System, which is itself subject to considerable criticism. ¹ Significant reductions in emissions are also expected to result from micro-economic devices for governing individual behaviour, and it is these measures which are the focus of analysis here.

In the conventions of UK territorial accounting, individuals and households are treated as responsible for around half of current emissions, with domestic heating and electricity estimated to be 25 percent of the total, and private transport accounting for a further 24 percent (UK Climate Change Committee, 2008). Resulting policies focus on carbon reduction through changes in personal consumption: ‘We will need to radically reduce demand for energy and decarbonise the energy we use in our homes almost totally by 2050 … All households will need to play a part in this transformation’ (HM Government, 2009: 80–81). Radically reducing energy demand, however, means cutting consumer-driven economic growth. Thus far, government policies have avoided confronting the tension, if not direct contradiction, between climate change policies, consumerism and growth. The problem has been constituted as a matter of ‘greening’ individual consumer choice, through behaviour change techniques, in a self-regulating market where growth can continue.

Self-Governing Subjects Making ‘Pro-environmental Choices’ in a Consumer Society

The progressive shift, under neo-liberalism, from a concept of society where citizenship is founded on shared responsibility for welfare to a society of citizen consumers with a primary right to satisfy individual wants, poses considerable problems for any public policy which calls for recognition of the common good. The resulting neo-liberal strategies for shaping public conduct are characterized by Miller and Rose (2008) as governing through freedom: governments seek to align the attributed ‘self-interest’ of the consumer not just with short-term gratification, but also with a sense of longer-term personal responsibility for the risks of market society, from debt, to lack of paid work and poor health, to climate change. The problem becomes how ‘to find means by which individuals may be made responsible through their individual choices for themselves and those to whom they owe allegiance’ (2008: 214).

The calculus of self-interest in other words has to be made to encompass considerations of longer-term ‘costs and benefits’ of immediate choices, whether this entails the health risks of obesity or, in this case, the societal costs of consumerism. Constructing a responsible ‘calculating subject’ relies on a technology of human being, which treats conduct as divisible into discrete behavioural components ‘susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 7), before being re-assembled in modified form. Governance progresses by segmenting and categorizing behaviours for targeted intervention and monitoring of responses. In relation to climate change, behavioural techniques are intended to produce individuals who ‘internalise the logic of carbon reduction’ (While et al., 2010: 85), so that consumption is directed to ‘pro-environmental choices’ such as buying a smaller car, or reducing waste. Such choices may be incentivized through subsidies, grants or loans, while awareness of energy efficiency and waste is promoted through carbon footprint information to encourage behaviour in line with a carbon calculus (Rutland and Aylett, 2008).

Such projects succeed when these forms of knowledge are incorporated into self-understandings:

When individuals come to view themselves and their goals according to the same metrics as the state, and base their actions on these metrics, they become part of the network of self-regulating actors that is at the heart of the practice of governmentality. (Rutland and Aylett, 2008: 631)

While the dominant approach is enabling and voluntaristic, there is potential for a more disciplinary, authoritarian dimension. This may become prominent as neo-liberalism encounters resource limits, and governments look to mechanisms of carbon control ‘to reward and incentivise certain behaviours (or certain groups), whilst using coercive mechanisms to discipline and punish “non deserving” carbon users’ (While et al., 2010: 85–6). Overall, the model allows governments to treat the operations of markets and corporations per se as ‘above’ or ‘outside’ the societal frame of reference and therefore as exempt from questions of collective responsibility, while government’s role is limited to enabling, rather than leading or directing. In this way, government seeks to marry the apparently contradictory requirements of economic growth through consumerism, on the one hand, with carbon reductions on the other.

Technologies of Behaviour Change: The UK Pro-Environmental Behaviours Framework

The project of the carbon-calculating consumer is articulated in UK and Scottish government policy instruments which seek to locate significant responsibility for emissions with individuals. The Pro-Environmental Behaviours Framework published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra, 2008) is the most systematic guide, and is being adapted for use in Scotland. Its objectives are to identify ‘behaviours which will have an impact on carbon savings’ (Defra, 2008: 3), and to uncover ‘mechanisms for stimulating, facilitating and supporting behavioural change at individual and household level’ (Scottish Government, 2010: 1). The development of the Framework reflects the belief that socially and politically neutral, objective, facts about behaviour can be revealed by scientific technique, and used instrumentally to achieve policy goals.

Social conduct is construed as divisible into components amenable to interventions designed to re-engineer choices step by step. ‘Behaviours’ are treated as formed, maintained and reinforced under one set of conditions, which, it is argued, can be manipulated through ‘population segmentation, linked to a range of possible interventions’ (Defra, 2006: 3), and social marketing techniques designed to ‘nudge’ pro-environmental choices (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). ‘Behavioural entry points’ or ‘wedge behaviours’ are identified from focus group and survey data as a means to promote initial changes. Survey findings suggesting willingness to reduce household energy use, for example, have been translated into a programme for persuading people to turn down central heating thermostats by one degree centigrade. Further interventions might include small incentives, new product labelling and information and skills provision. Desired changes are positively promoted, through ‘behavioural levers’ to encourage choices designated as pro-environment, while alternatives are discouraged through penalties or ‘choice editing’ (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008), which aims to make the ‘default choice’ (of holiday, household product, etc.) the least environmentally damaging.

The resulting Framework uses evidence from government surveys of environmental attitudes and behaviour to delineate ‘a set of 12 headline behaviour goals’ (Defra, 2008: 5) categorized under three areas of consumption: ²

Each behaviour goal, from ‘increase recycling’ to ‘install micro-generation’, is further classified on a scale of low to high impact and attributed level of difficulty. The latter assessment is derived from evidence about differential ability and willingness to do more. Ability to act is assessed according to constraints such as income, while willingness is based on a stated wish to do more, as well as evidence of ‘internal barriers and motivations to act in a more environmentally friendly way’ (Defra, 2008: 45). Behavioural categories regarded as most amenable to change are defined as wasting less food, saving household energy and using less water. The more difficult changes are identified either in terms of low ability (e.g. installing micro-generation of energy) or low willingness to act (e.g. driving or flying less).

The next stage of the strategy is concerned with ‘how environmental attitudes, values, current behaviours, and motivations and barriers are packaged together for defined segments of the population’ (Defra, 2008: 41), and ‘critically, whom we can motivate to live a greener life and how we could do this’ (2008: 41). Quantitative data ‘covering ecological worldview, sociogeodemographics, motivations and barriers, attitudes towards behaviours and current behaviours (in the home, product purchasing and travel) and knowledge and engagement levels’ (2008: 41) are used to construct detailed profiles of population segments. From this process, seven groups are defined, ranging from positive greens (18% of population) through waste watchers (12%), concerned consumers (14%), sideline supporters (14%) and cautious participants (14%) to stalled starters (10%) and honestly disengaged (18% of population). To be used as a tool for influencing conduct, the model must connect each category with differentiated behaviour change devices. The ‘4Es model’ (Enable, Engage, Encourage, and Exemplify), from Defra’s (2005) UK Sustainable Development Strategy, is used to propose interventions regarded as effective for different groups. ‘Positive greens’, ‘concerned consumers’ and ‘sideline supporters’, for example, are seen as likely to respond to ‘interventions that enable and engage, … by tackling external barriers (such as information, facilities and infrastructure …) and engaging through communications, community action, targeting individual opinion leaders’ (Defra, 2008: 10). ‘Stalled starters’ and the ‘honestly disengaged’ are seen as least susceptible to influence, and as requiring ‘interventions that enable and encourage, for example choice editing in product availability or, where necessary, regulation’ (2008: 11). Population profiling implies potential for a disciplinary approach, which is reinforced by references to regulatory tools such as ‘personal carbon allowances’. At present, however, strategies for voluntaristic alignment of attributed self-interest with carbon reduction are dominant.

Government presents its role as acting through multiple stakeholders in public, private and third sectors, resulting in an image of an individual consumer targeted by a dense network of complex institutional actors, each seeking to re-channel the choices of the self-interested consumer into a calculus of carbon reduction. With survey data providing no evidence of ‘appetite for radical lifestyle change’ (Defra, 2008: 74), cautious interventions, which ‘fit within people’s current lifestyle, even if one might aim for more fundamental shifts over the longer term’ (2008: 18), are the result. In practice, the outcomes of this elaborate behavioural technology, with its complexity, detailed data and refinements, are very conservative.

Unruly Subjects of Behaviour Change?

Incremental behaviour change measures, aiming to promote ‘green consumerism’ within parameters of current consumption, are extremely unlikely to produce the radical reductions in energy demand which the UK’s Low Carbon Transition Plan (HM Government, 2009) envisages. The citizen consumer, taught to equate freedom and self-worth with individual rights to consumption of an unending variety of positional goods, while being made individually responsible for life risks, is encouraged to regard the common good as a burdensome cost: ‘a consumer demands more and more protection while accepting less and less the need to participate in the running of the state’ (Bauman, 1999: 156).

Moreover, mainstream political narratives continue to focus on the importance of increasing consumer spending in order to boost economic growth, and an educated population, with access to global media, are likely to be aware of policy contradictions and to question business and government motives. Defra’s (2007) Citizens’ Summit on Climate Change for example, involved 150 participants in deliberative debate. Their views reflected distrust of politicians, and criticism of government hypocrisy over measures such as urging individuals to reduce car use or to fly less, while simultaneously promoting new car sales, or planning airport expansion, or failing to reduce their own international travel. Governments are no longer deferred to, or regarded as primary sources of authoritative information about how to live. British opinion surveys show that government were trusted by around 15 percent of adults, ³ and the proportion of respondents not trusting any sources has increased significantly from 6 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2009 (Eleini, 2010). In the Scottish Environmental Attitudes and Behaviours Survey 2008 (Davidson et al., 2009), 11 percent cited government information as a key source of information, while only 3 percent used government websites; less than 1 percent regarded government information sources as the most important, with radio and TV news and documentaries given higher priority. In addition, a constant flow of well-financed, seductive marketing by global corporations is designed to appeal to the notion that the best solution to life’s problems lies in crafting an individualized identity from the latest consumer artefacts and experiences (Smart, 2010). With multiple sources of information, conveying contradictory messages, and low levels of trust in government, social marketing and behaviour change campaigns are likely to fail simply by being ignored by the vast majority of those whose conduct is targeted.

Neither have information campaigns resulted in shared public understanding of, and knowledge about, climate change. Higher general awareness is matched by confusion about the causes, and consequences, of climate change, the status of the science and the intentions of government (Davidson et al., 2009; Lorenzoni et al., 2007; Upham et al., 2009). While the ONS annual opinion (Omnibus) survey data, 2009, for example, found that 76 percent were very or fairly concerned about climate change and the environment, concern had decreased slightly since 2006 (Eleini, 2010). Claims to knowledge about climate change vary, with the Defra (2009) tracker survey of public attitudes and behaviours in England finding that 61 percent claim to know a lot or a fair amount, compared with 53 percent of respondents to the 2009 ONS (omnibus) British Opinions survey, and 48 percent of those in Scotland (Davidson et al., 2009). Claims to knowledge are not, however, reflected in clear understanding of causes and impacts of climate change, with limited awareness of the contribution of different activities to carbon emissions (Upham et al., 2009). Defra’s synthesis of evidence on public understanding shows the patchy understanding of the relationship between consumption practices and carbon emissions, with all participants in five independent projects having ‘a poor understanding of the relative impact of different behaviours on the environment’ (Dresner et al., 2007: ii). There was, for example, evidence of assumptions that a ‘pro-environment’ routine such as recycling is a way to offset occasional high impact consumption.

The same survey evidence indicating increasing awareness of climate change and environmental degradation also suggests limited internalization of a ‘carbon calculus’ and limited impact on consumption practices (Flynn et al., 2010; Lorenzoni et al., 2007; SDC, 2006; Upham, et al., 2009; Webb, 2010). Even in areas where self-reported change is evident, such as the 75 percent who state that they are careful about using energy at home and the 90 percent who report recycling of household rubbish (Defra, 2009; Eleini, 2010), there are grounds for scepticism. Given the topic of the survey, and levels of professed concern about the environment, self-reported actions are likely to give an exaggerated estimate of actual energy conservation and recycling efforts. Moreover, energy consumption itself is not necessarily seen as a cause of climate change, with only 36 percent of respondents making this connection (Defra, 2009). Short-term preoccupations with practicality, convenience and cost, in combining work, domestic life and social life, typically dominate over longer-term concerns about environmental degradation and climate change, which are simultaneously experienced as abstract and remote from everyday concerns, and of such scale that they are not amenable to solution by individuals and households (Upham et al., 2009).

A behaviourist model interprets this apparent ‘value-action gap’ as a non-reflexive fact about individual self-interest, which is in turn interpreted by government as a barrier to decisive action. Attitudes and behaviours are constituted as fixed entities, rather than as embedded in the flux of social relations and structures from which they derive meaning. Items in the Defra 2009 tracker survey, for example, ask respondents to indicate on a scale from 1–5 the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements such as:

The validity of responses to such statements as self-evident indicators of fixed personal attributes is highly debatable. Responses to decontextualized survey items do not predict how someone will act in a different social context (Upham et al., 2009). Each of the items above relies heavily on socially situated understandings of what is ‘normal’, valued or expected. Respondents bring considerable knowledge to interpreting the statements, and to situating themselves in relation to highly elaborated arguments: an unknowing participant would be unable to make sense of a statement such as ‘people have a duty to recycle’, or ‘I don’t believe my everyday behaviour and lifestyle contribute to climate change’. Respondents will, of necessity, import assumptions, values and experiences to the interpretation of such statements and, will, as knowing and reflexive respondents, answer each item according to conjectures about what lies behind it. They may be suspicious about the motives behind a statement such as ‘people have a duty to recycle’, and speculate whether agreement might herald penalties for failing to recycle. Recent personal experiences or media stories influence responses, such that the 2010 UK cold winter might be associated with higher rates of agreement that ‘the so-called “environmental crisis” facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated’ or conversely a trip to the winter Olympics in Vancouver, with its ‘imported snow’, might be associated with higher rates of disagreement. (25% of respondents to the Defra 2009 English tracker survey agreed with this statement, while 46% disagreed.) In a different context, suggesting to car users that they should be taxed for ‘damaging the environment’ is unlikely to produce a high rate of agreement, when car use is normative in combining the demands of work, social life and family (Flynn et al., 2010; Urry, 2010), and road transport accounts for a significant percentage of public spending. (In Defra’s 2009 survey, 55% disagreed with such taxation while 25% agreed.) In short, cultural perspectives, social institutions and political values mediate the interpretation of climate science and responses to attitudinal surveys (Leiserowitz et al., 2010), suggesting far from predictable reactions to behavioural tools.

Technologies of Behaviour Change: A Chimera of Control?

The self-governing individualized subject of neo-liberalism is proving to be a reluctant convert to the carbon calculus. From a sociological perspective it is not difficult to understand why this is the case, or why apparent public concern about climate change can coexist with habits of ‘consumption as usual’. The technology of behaviour change is a potent example of what Bauman (1993) describes as the technological dissembly of the moral self, which results in a skillful capacity to segment knowledge about our selves and society and to rationalize the inconsistencies and contradictions experienced. The elaborate apparatus of behaviour change itself is integral to this process. It produces measures which are not only very limited, but frequently obvious, and which may work counter-rationally to justify existing practices, rather than disrupting them. Two examples drawn from the ‘headline behaviour goals’ (Defra, 2008) are examined here.

First, the behaviour goal ‘using the car less for short trips’ has been addressed partly through the social marketing programme, Act on CO2, ⁴ whose objective is to explain the seriousness of climate change, and the link with carbon dioxide emissions. A recent campaign has promoted the message ‘drive 5 miles less a week’, with the desired change broken down into five suggested ways of driving five miles less, and a website linking to further information about how to calculate and reduce car emissions. The intervention is related to the expectation that ‘wedge behaviours’ open the way to more significant change, and that an initial small reduction will build up to greater change. This ‘small steps’ model is contested by a review of the evidence from evaluation studies (Thøgersen and Crompton, 2009), which concludes that there is no dependable link from ‘simple and painless’ change to progressive commitment to more major change. Even if small steps could lead to progressively greater change, detailed modelling of behaviour seems an unnecessarily elaborate means to devise such a basic target. Similarly, it is unlikely that car drivers will look for detailed guidance on how to reduce their driving by five miles a week. Moreover, such small steps may suggest to a sceptical public that, if minor changes are all that is needed, then there is little point in paying attention. Advocating a minor change in driving habits might thus work to confirm the long-term viability of car dependence.

Second, the headline behaviour goal ‘more responsible water usage’ treats water use as divisible into behavioural components which can be changed through interventions introducing a new calculus of waste. In attitude and behaviour surveys, respondents have been asked how often they ‘Turn off the tap when brushing your teeth’ or ‘Fill the kettle with more water than you are going to use’, as well as being asked how they think their behaviour compares with that of others. Such behaviours are in turn treated as ‘entry points’ for more substantial change. The model assumes that there is limited need for people to understand the reasons for reduced water consumption. As Defra’s focus group research shows (Owen et al., 2009), public knowledge about water scarcity and the environmental damage from energy-intensive water treatment remains very limited. Those who were aware of behaviour goals such as turning off the tap when brushing teeth, shaving or washing hands, or taking a short shower rather than a bath, did not associate these ‘behaviours’ with growing concern about wasting water or environmental damage, or with increased personal commitment to changing established habits of use:

As few understand the environmental reasons why it is important to be water efficient, there is little guilt about only adopting these behaviours to a limited extent, if at all. Water usage is based on ingrained habits, beliefs that water is plentiful and a right, as well as a lack of conscious awareness and knowledge about the issue. (Owen et al., 2009: 3)

Simply communicating the behaviour change targets ‘without trying to address the question of “why” people should adopt the behaviours … could encourage uptake of the current behaviour goals, but is unlikely to prompt water saving behaviour beyond this’ (Owen et al., 2009: 6).

Water consumption itself is not necessarily perceived as integral to the accomplishment of taken-for-granted activities; instead, it is one part of a complex inter-relation of the material, the conventional and the temporal which constitute ordinary social practices (Shove, 2003). Analyses of practices reliant on water, such as showering, reveal their embeddedness in socio-technical configurations of material culture, equipment, markets, energy and water supply, and demonstrate the socially situated and contingent qualities of water use (Hand et al., 2005; Shove et al., 2007). Responsible water use is far from a simple behaviour: deliberative debate, designed to make water use and waste the subject of conscious awareness, resulted in participants asking complex questions about different ways of managing change, as well as exploring emerging concerns, social divisions, and attributions of responsibility for the problems (Russell and Lux, 2009). Substantive change cannot therefore be created by means of a model of compartmentalized behaviour components. Minimally, a grounded understanding of the changing circumstances of water security, habits of use, and energy-intensity of water provision is required. Even this is unlikely to produce significant change without societal engagement in the remaking of socio-technical configurations of equipment, markets, water treatment regulations and material cultures.

These examples show the institutionally embedded complexity of ordinary practices, and suggest that a technology of behaviour change, focusing on the detailed interventions needed even to begin to modify patterns of behaviour, is likely to be a project whose targets unfold into infinity, and whose practical outcomes show diminishing returns on investment. Such technologies may operate in effect to limit, if not undermine, the major changes in consumption which are ostensibly sought. The framing of the problem excludes explicit political questions about the sustainability of consumerism as a way of life, and reduces government to the application of individualized behavioural levers. The ‘carbon-calculating adjustment’ is expected to equip each individual consumer to choose low carbon alternatives, in markets designed to associate satisfaction, prestige and self-worth with increasing consumption of carbon-intensive products. Even if some people choose what is presented as the ‘environmentally friendly’ option, such individual decisions cannot resolve the global impacts of consumerism. Green consumerism may instead contribute to individualizing and depoliticizing the issues, further weakening the impetus for collective political action (Smart, 2010).

Treating people as primarily consumers, whose well-being depends on acquisition of an infinite array of products and services, is not commensurable with messages informing them that ‘normal consumption’ is threatening well-being. The socio-technical infrastructure of urban life and relationships, configured around complex systems designed to incentivize consumption to excess, high levels of individual mobility, and conspicuous waste, are critical in shaping activities and priorities (Anable et al., 2006; SDC, 2006; Shove, 2003; Urry, 2010; Webb, 2010). The ‘split mind’ of the public, construed as simultaneously individualized hedonistic consumer and responsibilized carbon-calculating citizen, is reflected in the structural ‘split mind’ of a government model committed to economic growth driven by consumerism on the one hand, and shared obligations for transition to a sustainable society on the other.

Shallow Understandings, Calculative Behaviour and Denial

Such splitting, Cohen (2001) argues, is significant as a social practice of denial, which is rewarded in capitalist societies where the dissociation of means from ends enables convenient fictions and evasions to be perpetuated. Indeed, only by maintaining this segmented knowledge can the damage done by industrialized production and consumption be obscured or rationalized: ‘the emancipation which modernity brought in its wake … will remain forever … a privilege achieved by some at somebody else’s expense’ (Bauman, 1993: 214). The model of a ‘carbon-calculating individual’ depends on such splitting and is integral to the construction of a shallow form of engagement with critical questions about the sustainability of a way of life built around unlimited consumption. Segmentation of objectified behaviours works to normalize a technocratic understanding of social reality and identity; people are invited to see themselves as no more than the sum of their discrete behaviours, produced through a sequence of disconnected cost-benefit calculations. Rather than the sense of internalized responsibility for reducing carbon emissions, such a behaviour change model promotes a self skilled in compartmentalizing responsibility. Only 8 percent of survey respondents, for example, regard households as responsible for change (Pidgeon et al., 2008), and there is a common belief that little can be achieved by personal change in habits, resulting in an ambivalent orientation to attributions of blame and responsibility (Lorenzoni et al., 2007; Stoll-Kleemann et al., 2001). Calculative and fragmented engagement in ‘behaviour goals’ such as driving less, or reducing energy use, is likely to produce a ‘wait and see’ calculation of what incentives might be offered. The incremental model may also legitimate an assumption that climate change is a distant concern and can be dealt with at some unspecified point in the future. The perceived gap between government behaviour change campaigns and government economic policies is itself interpreted as evidence that the problem is not serious.

Within this frame, the environment is construed instrumentally as an object which exists outside, and in opposition, to human self-interest and well-being (Beck, 2010). Asking about agreement or disagreement with the statement ‘any changes I make to help the environment need to fit in with my lifestyle’, for example, constructs ‘lifestyles’ as matters of free personal choice unaffected by ‘environment’. The item implies that such an object-environment may be deserving of ‘help’, although this would entail sacrifice. Self-interest is thus constituted as existing in opposition to an environment, which needs to be ‘controlled’ perhaps through the application of science and technology, but only when money is available. In the context of a society experiencing increasingly frequent extremes of weather such as floods or droughts, however, it seems unlikely that the first consideration would be ensuring that lifestyle preferences, as opposed to life itself, are protected.

The model of human being which emerges is one of an opportunistic individual, selecting and assembling a self-identity from the available ‘pick’n’mix’ suite of attitudes, motives and choices. What is lost is the capacity to conceive of our selves as totalities ‘greater than collections of fragments’ (Bauman, 1993: 197). Such a circumscribed and instrumentally framed moral basis for accountability encourages cynicism, and excuses a knowing denial of the real threats from carrying on as usual. It erodes a sense of collective responsibility for change, grounded in a knowledgeable civil society (Sandel, 2009). Tacitly, it confers public permission on a common cultural form of knowing self-deception, which works through ignoring or not acknowledging what is known. Such denial is a means of coping with discomforting and disruptive knowledge about climate change and consumer society. Cohen (2001) argues that denial of uncomfortable knowledge is particularly likely in the context of a culture where epistemic and moral relativism are the norm such that all truths become rhetorical accounts, and are treated as negotiable. Neo-liberalism, he suggests, generates particular cultures of denial through relative exclusion, or segregation, of alternative forms of self-knowledge. In constructing a technical expertise of behaviour, the social and behavioural professions, using measurement, monitoring and evaluation tools, contribute to marginalizing practical knowledge, and to the erosion of a sense of capacity and collective responsibility for a shared fate.

Submerged Policy Knowledge about Societal Change

Processes of denial and splitting have not, however, excluded more subtle understandings of societal and cultural change. Such alternative understandings are only ever partially obscured by the dominant frame of objectified and individualized behaviours. Government policy documents themselves contain shadow, subordinated constructions of the public issues, which convey a more complex analysis of the social relations of consumption and its political-economic determinants, but this seems to be outside what can be openly acknowledged and debated in formal policy commitments. The considerable research informing Defra’s (2008) Framework for Pro-environmental Behaviours and related policies, ⁵ for example, repeatedly presents insight into the significance of current socio-technical infrastructures, work/life patterns, social norms, values and societal practices, as well as evidence of people’s desire to understand the reasons for change, to be sufficiently informed to act knowledgeably and to be part of a bigger social change with a meaningful impact (Defra, 2006; Dresner et al., 2007). Defra’s (2007) Citizens’ Summit highlighted the perceived lack of integrity in government, public scepticism and a sense of disempowerment, and hence the need to rebuild trust between government and public, and the importance of shared responsibility for change. Community-level and collective engagement is understood as central, as is leading by example, and consistency across government policies.

In events bringing policy makers, practitioners and researchers together, societal analyses and understandings are also much in evidence. The Scottish Government (2010) Climate Change Behaviours Programme, for example, which uses a ‘key behaviours’ model, has reported on the ‘ten key messages’ emerging from the 2010 conference ‘What Works in Behaviour Change?’. Although ‘behaviour’ is referred to extensively, the word ‘individual’ does not appear, and reference to ‘levers’ of change is to integrated structural changes, such as provision of infrastructure and regulation. Government leadership, recognition of social norms, shared identities and shared responsibility are all listed as requirements. The Scottish research programme is not due to be completed until later in 2011, and the eventual statement of intent will indicate whether this societal framing can be incorporated into formal policy.

Knowledge and understanding of society as a collective human accomplishment is not therefore absent from policy practices, but current administrative strategies, and cultures of specialized and fragmented expertise, which allow politicians and policy makers to draw boundaries around their own limits of responsibility, have relegated such analyses to the margins and defined them as outside the frame of practicable change.

Conclusions

Neo-liberal micro-economic governance, through behaviour change technology, offers limited and largely self-defeating means of transition to a sustainable society. Levels of public awareness of, and concern about, climate change suggest that behaviour change measures, alongside other experiences, news and information, have an effect. But the results are highly circumscribed, and understanding of the connections between consumerism and environmental degradation is relatively shallow. The demands of everyday life dominate over what can be compartmentalized as more distant concerns about an objectified external environment, treated as separate from human life and well-being.

In adopting an individualized consumer model of citizenship, government strategy simultaneously obscures or marginalizes societal analyses, and obstructs acknowledgement of the contradictions between neo-liberal political economy and sustainable society. Short-term, instrumental economic values thus dominate climate change debate, to the extent that other systems of value are downgraded. The result is a perspective which is unable to identify effective routes towards a sustainable way of life. It produces at best incremental change, which is unstable, fragmented and subject to reversal in the light of events. At worst, it keeps off the agenda the major questions about modern societies and sustainable economic activity with which democratic governments and their publics need to engage. This points to the importance of questions, not about the relative gap between public attitudes and behaviour and why this exists, or what levers might be devised to incentivize further small changes, but about the circumstances which could enable subordinated or shadow understandings to develop substantively, to be acknowledged and to be acted on systematically.

The societal perspective exemplified by sociology has had a marginal role in public debate and policy-making. The pre-given commitment to market mechanisms as tools of climate governance marginalizes understandings of social practices as ‘embedded in, and constitutive of, infrastructure and convention’ (Shove, 2010: 1.12). This has also contributed to the weakening of sociological capacity to engage substantively and critically in policy, and in debate with the public about its institutions. All variants of sociological engagement can contribute to such debate, and can work in unanticipated, as well as deliberate, ways to further constructive engagement in what are undoubtedly major public issues for the future of society.

Government reliance on individual behavioural technologies for societal solutions entails looking back to a positivist model of science as producing objective truths about discrete behaviours. It allows governments to allocate responsibility for policy goals to experts, rather than to politicians (Hulme, 2009), and allows the work of governance to proceed seemingly productively. The sociology of science has long demonstrated that all knowledge is socially shaped (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), opening the door to a more reflexive understanding of the kinds of knowledge we have, and its part in the constitution of particular priorities. This understanding indicates the need for a more reflexive model for policy-making, which can respond to the complex relationships between politicians, experts and publics. Hulme (2009) argues that a co-production model of knowledge and policy recognizes that policy goals and their attainment are necessarily informed by political values; consequently, policy processes are never reducible to matters of technique alone. In engaging with debates about climate change, sociology casts light on the constructions of society and social change embedded in climate policy and governance, and contributes to a co-production model through questions about policy goals, power relations and responsibilities. It points to the need for public empowerment which is not one-way and top-down, but requires governments to engage through substantive debate about the major risks of climate change, and to negotiate shared responsibilities for policy, in relation to actions grounded in the common good.