Environmental Policy and Household Behaviour

Sustainability and Everyday Life

Patrik Soderholm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844078974
• eBook ISBN: 9781134040131
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Our behaviour in our own homes - our recycling habits, consumer choices and transport preferences - all have a huge impact on the environment locally and globally. Governments across the world are trying to formulate and implement policies to encourage and enforce more sustainable household actions. Yet so often these policies fail to have the desired effects because of a lack of understanding of the complex interplay of policy and individual behaviour.

This book examines this interplay, looking at the role of values, attitudes and constraints in the links between policy and changing behaviour at the household level. The first part of the book explores the theoretical background looking at the politics of lifestyles and lifestyle change, policy legitimacy and barriers and facilitators for pro-environmental behaviour. The second part is made up of in-depth case studies from Sweden - one of the fore-running countries in this area - examining three main types of household behaviour: waste and recycling; consumption and labelling; and transportation choices. Within these case studies, the contributors examine what policy initiatives have and haven't worked and the role of values and constraints in those processes.

This is the first inter-disciplinary, in-depth look at how environmental policy enters the private, domestic sphere. The theoretical insights and policy guidance the book offers will be vital in the drive to generate behaviour change at the household level and the move towards sustainable societies.

1

Environmental policy and household behaviour: An introduction to the volume

Patrik Söderholm

BACKGROUND, OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE

It is increasingly recognized that environmental problems are not only the result of industrial activity in a few polluting facilities; they also stem from the millions of choices that people make in everyday life. The implementation of environmental policies therefore often requires ordinary people’s active involvement, and many existing and new environmental requirements (e.g. Agenda 21) are expressed in terms of household-related activities like recycling and actively choosing eco-labelled products and services. Still, the successful implementation of such policies also poses significant challenges for policy-makers. First, it is often claimed that citizens in, for instance, Europe and North America, commonly hold strong environmental attitudes and values, and people generally say they are willing to undertake a number of household-related activities that promote a sustainable environment. Still, these attitudes do not always translate into daily behaviour. Second, various types of policy instruments (e.g. information campaigns, fees, regulations and infrastructural measures) are used to achieve household compliance with environmental policies and intentions. For such policy tools to be effective and legitimate, however, politicians and practitioners need an increased understanding of how policy interplays with household values, attitudes and the constraints (in terms of time, money and knowledge) that they face in their daily lives.

Households who aim at integrating environmental concerns in their daily habits and decisions often face a so-called social dilemma situation, i.e. the individual interest is at odds with what is best for the collective. One of the main challenges for public policy is therefore to address and resolve this dilemma in ways that maintain – and strengthen – policy effectiveness and legitimacy. In the social science literature (not least in psychology research) it is suggested that the presence of norms – i.e. informal rules requiring that one should act in a given way in a given situation – may provide an important reason for a departure from a social dilemma outcome. Still, the study of households’ pro-environmental behaviour is meaningful only if norms and attitudes and the relevant constraints, in terms of money, time and inconvenience facing households, are analysed in conjunction.

This book is a collection of jointly organized studies on the integration of household activities and values into the forming of an environmentally sustainable society in Sweden. The individual chapters all emanate from the multidisciplinary research programme SHARP – Sustainable Households: Attitudes, Resources and Policy. The programme has been carried out in joint cooperation between four Swedish universities, Luleå University of Technology, Linköping University, Umeå University and Karlstad University, over the time period 2003 to 2008. It has been supported financially by both the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) and, in particular, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). Since its inception, the overall objective of the SHARP programme has been to analyse the integration of household activities and attitudes into the forming of an environmentally sustainable society in Sweden. Specifically, the research programme as well as the contributions to this book aims at:

• investigating the role of households and household behaviour in achieving environmental policy objectives;

• analysing the constraints that households face when pursuing environmental activities, and how they organize and integrate these activities in daily life, given these constraints and in the presence of environmental attitudes and values;

• clarifying the circumstances under which environmental policy instruments will be effective and perceived by households as legitimate.

A few of the research studies presented in the book address theoretical aspects of the general design of environmental policy and how it impinges on households’ daily activities, but much attention is also paid to empirical findings. Empirically the research presented focuses both on overall activity patterns in Swedish households, but it also presents in-depth studies on three partly interrelated types of household activities: (a) waste sorting and recycling behaviour; (b) overall consumption patterns and the active purchasing of eco-labelled products; and (c) mode of transportation behaviour.

The Swedish context is interesting for several reasons. Sweden often scores high in international rankings of environmental policy, and it is generally believed to be a forerunner in striving towards environmental and social sustainability. This is mirrored in, for instance, the country’s low carbon emissions per capita and high household waste recycling rates. These and other policy progresses may thus offer important policy lessons for other countries. However, there are also clear signs of unsustainable behaviour (e.g. personal car use, high overall energy consumption per capita) – even in an international comparison. Environmental policy in Sweden therefore faces a number of important challenges, and some of these are related to the fact that public decision-making is highly decentralized in the country; policy instruments are typically designed at the municipal (local) level and there is a de facto territorial planning monopoly of Swedish municipalities. While the above may imply an opportunity to address specific geographic and cultural contexts in policy design and implementation, it also means that it can be difficult to implement national (and ultimately global) policies at the local level. Other policy objectives, such as regional economic growth, may easily dominate the local political debate and hence hamper policies and infrastructural projects that constrain, for instance, private car use and/or other specific consumption patterns.

The SHARP programme is multidisciplinary and the contributors to the volume represent a number of different academic disciplines and fields: environmental law, economics, political science, policy studies, psychology, history, as well as technology and social change. The respective chapters represent original studies and syntheses emanating from the six different research projects within the SHARP programme (see www.sharpprogram.se for details). For this reason our methodological approach differs from many earlier studies in that it combines analyses based on intensive structuring, involving deep interviews, time diaries and travel diaries with more extensive information about attitudes, behaviour and constraints gathered via surveys from a large number of households as well as through statistical analyses of large databases.

CONTENTS

The remainder of the book is divided into two main parts, each comprising four to five self-contained chapters, and finally a concluding part with a final chapter. The first part is general in scope and it provides a discussion of key concepts and analytical issues in the study of sustainable household behaviour and environmental policy, but it also presents broad empirical illustrations. The main contents of the four chapters that make up this first part of the book are summarized below.

Chapter 2, co-authored by Carina Lundmark, Simon Matti and Gabriel Michanek, discusses how contemporary environmental policies in Sweden and elsewhere tend to challenge our daily routines. For this reason these policies present a fundamental democratic challenge as freedom of choice and the pursuit of individual lifestyles are restricted. The authors explore the tension between environmental responsibilities and individual freedom of action as it is presented in Swedish environmental policy and legislation. An important finding is that an environmental norm manifests itself in the country’s official policy documents, clearly stating that particular behaviours, and even lifestyles, are preferable from an environmental viewpoint. The analysis, however, also suggests that the potential conflict between environmental obligations on the one hand and the pursuit of individual life projects on the other largely is avoided as environmental responsibility primarily is placed on individuals in their roles as consumers in economic markets, rather than on democratic citizens. There is thus scope for taking the step in policy away from overall guidance and information towards more clearly encouraging the development of politically skilled citizens.

Karin Skill and Elin Wihlborg note in Chapter 3 that the environmental challenge implies that public policy enters the domestic sphere. Thus, assessing the prospects for environmental citizenship implies not least an understanding of the everyday context in which householders take decisions and perform different activities. The analysis in the chapter builds on 60 semi-structured interviews with Swedish householders, and it revolves around a number of themes concerning everyday responsibilities that emerged through these empirical studies. One theme concerns the complexity of the environmental challenge, namely how to know what the environmental effects of the individual activities are, whose descriptions to trust and by what rationality the effects and efficiency of different policies should be assessed. Often environmentally motivated activities concern detailed aspects of everyday life, and they are involved in the regular performance of activities. For this reason householders simplify life through routines and practices, and focus on a specific subset of environmental activities. Moreover, this also implies that householders often rationalize their behaviour, and one activity (e.g. household waste sorting) may act as an excuse for more demanding activities that are more difficult to integrate in daily life (e.g. leave the car and take the bus instead). Overall, daily life makes up a complex whole, and it is therefore difficult to identify ‘sustainable lifestyles’; the ability to take personal responsibility as a citizen in the domestic sphere will depend critically on a set of enabling conditions.

The physical and geographical context of sustainable household behaviour will be important also in determining how people understand, receive and form their response towards the official environmental norm. In Chapter 4 Simon Matti notes that this is imperative since new institutions and policy instruments aiming at initiating and sustaining individual pro-environmental action need, for their long-term effectiveness, to be perceived as being legitimate in the sense that they build on or can be justified by reference to core values already established in society. The analysis presented in this chapter aims at evaluating the public legitimacy of Swedish environmental policy aspirations, by analysing their correspondence with core values and attitudes held by the Swedish citizenry; and discuss in what ways issues of policy legitimacy may influence households’ willingness to integrate environmentally friendly activities in their daily lives. The analysis reveals a distinct discrepancy between the image of citizens that emerges in official policy and the design of policy instruments and the image reflected by citizens themselves. Firstly, while personal freedom and self-determination are certainly prized by Swedish citizens, environmental protection is also prioritized when people weigh one value against another. This suggests that future environmental policy has good prospects for implementing effective environmental protection measures while remaining legitimate in the eyes of the public. Secondly, the discrepancy becomes apparent in the question of people’s motives for behaving in an environmentally friendly way when people explicitly assert that the morally based willingness to do the right thing has greater impact on motivation than financial rewards or punishments.

In order to empirically investigate, not least in quantitative terms, the main determinants of pro-environmental behaviour, the associated barriers and facilitators need to be categorized and operationalized. Chapter 5, co-authored by Annika Nordlund, Louise Eriksson and Jörgen Garvill, summarizes four types of causal variables influencing environmentally significant behaviour. These factors take into account the importance of both moral values as well as the constraints that face citizens in daily life. They include: (a) contextual factors such as the physical, economic and social context in which the individual acts; (b) personal capabilities such as the knowledge, time and money available to the individual; (c) attitudinal factors, which include the values, beliefs, attitudes and norms the individual holds; and finally (d) the habitual quality of many everyday behaviours. In relation to different environmentally significant behaviours, the importance of these four factors may vary, and there are several examples of how different factors interact in determining behaviour. The chapter reviews the importance of different factors for environmentally significant behaviours within the central areas of consumption, waste handling, and travel behaviour. In addition, the relations between these factors (e.g. how attitudinal and habitual factors interact) in predicting pro-environmental behaviour are summarized. Based on studies conducted within the SHARP programme and other relevant studies, the way in which these factors may function as facilitators or barriers for environmentally sustainable behaviour is discussed.

By providing a general theoretical framework for understanding pro-environmental behaviour, Chapter 6 sets the stage for the second part of the book, which contains conceptually coordinated case studies of different household activities – e.g. consumption behaviour and environmental labelling, waste sorting, mode of transportation choice, etc. – and the impact of different policies in each case. This part comprises five chapters, and all of these focus on some (or all) of the factors in the review above, and the empirical investigations build on both context-rich studies of individual households with more aggregate investigations based on, for instance, survey data.

In Chapter 6, Hilde Ibsen discusses how a so-called alternative movement blossomed in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s, and the political–ideological debate expanded to increasingly include environmental issues. An essential component of this new movement was the vision of ecologically sustainable communities. This chapter presents the results from an empirical study of the experiences of the first eco-village in Sweden, which was initiated in the late 1970s and is still present. The research involves follow-up interviews of how the eco-villagers view their active choice of a sustainable lifestyle, and how their day-to-day lives in turn have been affected by this choice. The outgrowth of the eco-village was based extensively on the homogeneous ideological background and composition of the founding group. Most of them already knew one another, and were highly educated. Taken as a whole, the analysis shows that ambition, capacity and knowledge appear to be key characteristics for reshaping daily life and independently translating concern for the environment into habitual behaviours. The experiences also illustrate that environmental efforts are both an individual and a collective responsibility in that the build-up of the eco-village was strongly dependent on support from municipal politicians and civil servants.

Chapter 7, authored by Kristina Söderholm, also provides an historical perspective of household behaviour in the environmental field. Specifically, it employs data on household consumption expenses, collected by Statistics Sweden over the time period 1958 to 2005, and analyses important changes and driving forces in consumption patterns over time. The author then adopts a socio-technological system perspective to illustrate how the Swedish state has – directly and indirectly – intervened in household consumption behaviour since the 1950s. The analysis shows that overall state housing policies, a state-supported rationalization of the construction process, initiatives to encourage society’s car adaptation and the rationalization of the retail distribution from the 1940s and onwards, have in combination formed socio-technological systems in turn influencing and embedding households’ consumption patterns. In sum, the socio-technological context in which people live their daily lives has historically had a distinct impact on Swedes’ household consumption patterns, something that reinforces the need for an environmental policy that examines and explains opportunities to influence this same context. In the case where specific consumption patterns (e.g. car use) are structural requirements, altering norms of behaviour will be difficult. Moreover, an effective public policy for sustainable development should also focus attention on how multiple policy areas (e.g. monetary policy, housing policy, social policy, etc.) influence household consumption patterns.

The purpose of Chapter 8, co-authored by Mats Bladh, Kristina Ek and Patrik Söderholm, is to analyse the role of eco-labelling in influencing consumer choices in Sweden. It reviews the development of the most important labelling schemes (e.g. the Nordic Swan, KRAV, etc.) in the country, and highlights some important crossroads in their formation over time. The chapter also discusses – and attempts at explaining – the outcome in terms of green market shares for selected product groups. Eco-labelling typically entails a strong individualization, while many environmental issues require the collective adoption of attitudes, and labelling policies have often been most effective when combined with campaigns against explicitly harmful products. An in-depth investigation of the case of eco-labelled electricity shows that peoples’ willingness to take personal responsibility in the green market place appears to be influenced by their perceptions of others’ contributions and the environmental impacts of their choice, but it is also heavily determined by the extra costs (price premium) of the eco-labelled products compared to the conventional products offered. Moreover, the chapter illustrates that peoples’ willingness to support market goods with strong public good characteristics is likely to depend on whether participation builds on shared as opposed to individual resp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Environmental Policy and Household Behaviour: An Introduction to the Volume
• PART I: ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND THE HOUSEHOLD: CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
• PART II: EMPIRICAL ANALYSES OF THE SWEDISH CASE
• PART III: CONCLUDING PART
• Index