An evaluation of public initiatives to change behaviours that affect water quality

Abstract

Pollution and environmental depletion are often caused by human behaviours, where if behaviours were modified, environmental pressure could be substantially reduced. Many public programmes aim to influence people to change their unsustainable behaviours but few undertake ex post evaluations of behavioural change programmes. This paper undertakes an evaluation of a 5year programme to understand whether community engagement activities lead to more sustainable practices. Using a treatment and control experiment, the research investigates whether programme participants are representative of the wider population, whether participation leads to sustainable practices, whether pro-environmental behaviours are sustained over time, and the relative effectiveness of different types of events on individual behaviours. Overall, results suggest that water engagement event participants are more likely to adopt sustainable behaviours, however attendees only represent a small cohort of the wider population, which possibly hinders a wider adoption of good practices. With respect to individual behaviours, different outcomes were detected for different behaviours, which suggests that not all behaviours were equally amenable to change. When comparing the impact of different events, events that are focused on building community ties were more successful than events with simple provision of information. Finally, new pro-environmental behaviours tend to be abandoned after a period of time, therefore reengagement at regular time intervals is advised.

Environmental Policies and the Promotion of Pro-Environmental Consumer Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Note that constraining regulatory, facilitating economic, and opportunity-facilitating informational instruments are the most effective at promoting pro-environmental consumer behavior. These important findings depart from previous literature that characterizes (1) regulatory policy instruments as merely suppressing, coercing, and bringing about unsettling emotions from the public (Nielsen, Holmberg, and Stripple 2019); (2) economic instruments as not effective once they are removed (Yang and Thøgersen 2022); and (3) informational policies as limited in stimulating actual uptake of pro-environmental behavior (Grolleau et al 2016). Thus, instead of relying on one type of environmental policy, our research suggests that macromarketers and policymakers should consider the different levels of coercion within each category of regulatory, economic, and informational instrument, as well as the potential combinations of these instruments, in stimulating changes in consumer behavior and marketing systems as a whole.…”

“…The second contribution of this research is that, through the lens of the MOA framework, our systematic review illustrates how the effectiveness of these policy instruments can be mixed, supporting concerns raised in previous literature (e.g., Grolleau et al 2016; Nielsen, Holmberg, and Stripple 2019; Yang and Thøgersen 2022). By classifying the environmental policies based on constraining versus facilitating (for economic and regulatory instruments) or facilitation of motivation, ability, or opportunity (for informational instruments), our review highlights how each type of environmental policy has its own benefits as well as drawbacks.…”

“…Economic instruments might be effective if the incentives are sufficiently high, but these extrinsic rewards can overrule intrinsic motivations (Yang and Thøgersen 2022). Finally, although informational instruments might increase environmental awareness, they unfortunately do not effectively convert to pro-environmental behavior (Grolleau et al 2016). Because of the piecemeal approach such that previous studies tend to employ only one type of policy instrument, research on environmental policies has made limited progress (Boström and Klintman 2019) as to whether there are differences between and within these three types of policy instruments.…”

“…To demonstrate the effects of environmental policies on pro-environmental consumer behavior, this systematic review employs the motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) model (MacInnis 2011). Unlike previous studies that examine specific pro-environmental consumer behavior such as food waste (Block et al 2016) or automated vehicles (Greenwald and Kornhauser 2019), or a single type of environmental policy instrument such as eco-labels (Grolleau et al 2016) or carbon pricing (Maestre-Andrés, Drews, and van den Bergh 2019), our review considers how different types of environmental policies impact pro-environmental consumer behavior broadly. We categorize policy instruments into subcategories to explore differences between and within these types.…”