Impact of Sustainable Development on Public Behaviour, The

This report is part of a study of the research evidence available on the concept of Sustainable Development (SD) in relation to the general public. The study was designed to provide communicators in Government and civil society in the United Kingdom (UK) with the evidence base on which to develop effective Sustainable Development communications. The report presents evidence on levels of public awareness and understanding of the concept of SD.

Key Findings

Public Awareness and Understanding of SD - Public awareness of the term Sustainable Development is low: across different surveys conducted for different reasons with different ‘publics’ in different places, around a third of people say they have heard of ‘Sustainable Development’. Levels of awareness of the term ‘SD’ are also shown to vary widely across subgroups of the general public including by variables of socio-economic grade (SEG) and age.
• Driving Public Behaviour Change for Sustainability - The evidence in the sources suggests many reasons why it is inadvisable, even unfeasible, to base a public awareness-raising campaign explicitly on the concept of Sustainable Development. That the term in its fullest sense is unstable, that it is unused by those who work with the public in the areas it delineates, and that the public shows little recognition of it or ability to negotiate with it, all suggest that the term ‘SD’ has little chance of being taken up, and used by the general public. The comparison between two types of public campaign shows that efforts to engage the public personally and locally (‘to start from where they are’) and to provide them with the information, support and above all infrastructure necessary to facilitate proenvironmental behaviours, are more effective on an individual level than are public awareness-raising campaigns.
• Sustainability and Public Behaviours - It is suggested that people mistrust government information, hold assumptions that government action is in fact damaging the environment , and that a significant proportion of the public is likely to claim they are already undertaking the actions that environmental campaigns call for, and that they cannot do any more. In the project of interpreting SD into a set of ‘sustainable behaviours’ which people could apply in their own lives, the setting of targets is found to be an impossibility (due to the immeasurable nature of sustainability), and the providing of comparable lifestyles is shown to be very problematic (due to a lack of available data). However, other evidence in this study suggests that providing indicators may in itself not appeal to the general public.
• Effective Applications of SD - The point is made that the public do not respond well to concept of ‘SD’ when it is explicitly put to them (often they do not respond at all). It has also been shown that the principles in SD need to be interpreted into ‘sustainable behaviours’ if the public is expected to relate to them (let alone adopt them) in their daily lives. For these reasons, and others relating to the unstable nature of the concept of SD, opportunities for applications of the term itself in everyday life seem limited. However there is substantial evidence in the sources included in this study that the concept of SD not only has unique value as a tool for debate, but that it is vital to the work of particular groups within the general public. There is evidence that the term should be explicitly promoted to people in these groups, so that they may use it as a planning tool, a learning tool and thinking tool.

In the light of the evidence above, the following recommendations are made for the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra):

• ‘Sustainable Development’ should not be made the subject of a communications campaign to the general public. The concept is not understood and cannot be defined (in a way that most of the public would be satisfied with).
• ‘Sustainable Lifestyles’ offer a model for public behaviour change, by laying out a framework for behaviours which individuals could adopt, resulting in positive impacts
  across all three dimensions of SD.
• It is impossible to set targets for ‘sustainable behaviours’, as there is no measurable point at which a behaviour can be deemed sustainable. It is also currently not possible to provide indicators for sustainability at the level of the individual (due to a lack of data); indicators may not be effective tools for public engagement in any case.
• Policies to drive behaviour change for sustainability should aim to change behaviours, and make changing attitudes a secondary objective.
• Behaviour change campaigns should be: action-orientated; focussed on only a narrow range of behaviours; community-led; immersed in local issues; and so forth
• Campaigns for sustainable behaviour change should employ a wide range of tools, including policy instruments, infrastructure provision, and information provision; a
  targeted approach observing differences between subgroups should be adopted.
• The Government is especially unable to get messages across to the public about the
  environment and about behaviour change; the role of NGOs in delivering behaviour
  change campaigns in partnership with government should be extended.
• If a communications campaign on the inter-related elements of sustainability is to be
  undertaken, it should consider adopting an anti-consumption, or a pro-social agenda;
  such a campaign would, of course, be more likely to raise awareness of the issues (or
  deepen understanding, through making connections) than it would be to elicit
  behaviour change.