Change behaviour first, attitudes will come later

After our discussion this week on what guides our tea buying, I was invited to answer this very question from someone at teacraft on linkedin. Check out this link to see the results and vote yourself: 

http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/58701/enpfv

How do we get people to consume more sustainably? Was interested to see Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams this week saying that people have "allowed themselves to become addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost". Although he recognises the importance of government leadership and action, he sees the problem from a spiritual perspective and one of personal transformation at the local level. He advocates the setting up of local carbon reduction action groups for example. The question is, if we are "locked in" to unsustainable consumption, will transformation from within ourselves and our communities actually deliver the scale of change we need to see? Or, should we really just give up on the personal transformation and focus purely on changing the macro structural forces that prevent us from being more "carbon capable"? I'm one for believing that you change people's behaviour's first if you have to (by making the right choice the obvious choice) and then maybe they'll see that they are being green and feel good about that. So lets change the behaviour now - and leave the attitude change till later.

what do I want to get out of this module and what do I find interesting about sustainable consumption?

Everything you learn on an MBA is, unsurprisingly, about business. How to do it better, more innovatively, more intelligently, more competitively. And if you are one of the Carbon MBA'ers, like me, you'll have been learning how to do it using less energy, producing less carbon and gaining more market share in the process. Everyone's a winner. Even the environment! This is all fine and dandy but for all this to happen it does rely on one tiny piece of dominant economic logic: Growth.

Growth. Can't live with it because it's eating up the planet (and I say this to my fellow carbonistas, even our low carbon techy super efficiencies will be outrun by it). But we can't live without it either. No growth? So it'll be mass unemployment, poverty, spiralling debt and economic collapse. Hmmm. I feel sorry for governments. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. The "growth dilemma".

So I am interested in sustainable consumption because I don't really want to use this MBA unless I can try and use what i've learnt to turn this juggernaut around. 2 little issues i'd like to have answers for: 1) can we develop steady state macro-economic models that work in a finite world? And 2) how can we REALLY change the social logic of consumerism? Can we rely on fringe movements like transition towns and "voluntary simplicity" (as important as they are)? Or perhaps we will have to wait for the big crash and rebuild from the ashes.....

stop telling fat people there's an obesity epidemic - it won't help!

the social psychology of persuading people to be good - some lessons for public awareness campaigns. Draws on the work of Robert Cialdini and Richard Taylor's book "nudge". This is excellent, catch it while it's still on iplayer!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mk7rq/Persuading_Us_to_Be_Good/