Enticing people with a money-saving message has always been part of the eco-communicator's armoury. When the credit crunch began to hit in late 2008, I looked at how those messages were being resurrected in the UK, through make-do-and-mend to more radical voices hoping for a wholesale redesign of the economy. Read that article here. It's a pdf file.
Cutting the carbs
When I wanted to lose weight and get a bit fitter, I did what millions of women and quite a few men have done around the world - I joined Weight Watchers. In doing so, I got interested in the parallels between the support and motivations that work for slimming, and the ones we use to promote a low-carbon lifestyle. So I used them to write an article for the environmentalist in November 2006.
Behave!
Changing behaviour, encouraging and enabling pro-environmental behaviours in particular, is endlessly fascinating. There are lots of theories of behaviour change, and lots of practitioners getting out there and trying to make it happen. And some of them even succeed from time to time! This article - Behave - which I wrote in 2007 - covers some approaches. There are also other models, like the six sources of influence which I came across recently. Start your exploration of that model with this great video!
The UK Government's Defra (Department of Food and Rural Affairs) has its own behaviour change models, which I wrote about here in the context of audience segmentation. NESTA also produced a great report on the use of established social marketing techniques to sell 'low carbon' living. My September 08 column in the environmentalist covered that.
Which approaches to behaviour change do you see being used by environmental organisations? And which are used by multi-national FMCG organisations? (That's Fast Moving Consumer Goods to you and me.) Clue: the behaviour FMCGs want to influence is purchasing behaviour.
OD for SD
I love it when I can cross-fertilise. When I can bring a gem of insightful knowledge from my work on organisational change, learning and development and pass it on to my passionate, committed and somewhat geeky colleagues in the world of environmental management, policy and general eco-knowledge. This article about OD - organisational development - explores how some different practitioners have drawn on ideas about change to help them push the environmental boundaries.
Raw data - consultants in business sustainability - OCAs only
"Organisational leader or part of a wider change movement? How sustainable development change agents see themselves", Penny Walker, EABIS Colloquium 2008.
Raw data used in this paper is available in this document. This page replaces the link given in the paper (http://www.penny-walker.co.uk/sd_change_agents_survey.html) which is no longer active.
Part of a wider change movement
This is a slide show that I gave to the EABIS Colloquium in 2008. It presents the results of a survey I conducted of organisational change agents, and asks how we can better support ourselves, and each other, at a time when we're getting better informed (and many of us more anxious) about the sustainability crisis.
View more presentations from PennyWalker.
There's also a paper and a journal article to accompany the slides. The article / chapter was originally published in Greener Management International and in "Consulting for Business Sustainability", edited by Chris Galea.