Review of Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis by Peter Newell, Freddie Daley and Michella Twena.

Review of Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis by Peter Newell, Freddie Daley and Michella Twena.

Newell, Daley and Twena’s affair with the idea of engaging with individual behaviour to solve the climate crisis in this short 70-page book is alluring. Analytically rich and structurally compact, Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis is a lucid engagement with the idea of how individual-level behaviour change features in the larger climate action debate. That the individual is a stakeholder, capable of steering change and responsibility is a plea underscoring the text. The text looks at these questions critically, in light of the structure vs. agency debate, to make its arguments. The main argument is that individual-led behaviour change is important and must be governed but it needs to be governed through a systemic context, for creating an ecosystem of transformation. The book is divided into six parts. Apart from the introduction and conclusion, Newell and the others engage with issues of scaling behaviour change, deployment of leverage points and tipping points, and future intervention points. 

The book begins with a general scepticism. They present several questions about behaviour change such as- How to bring about behaviour change? How much agency is to be assigned to people from different socio-economic backgrounds? How to scale individual-led change to achieve national and global emission reduction and other targets? How to address the issues related to measuring, monitoring and verifying individual-led change and translate them into systemic goals? He begins finding answers to these questions by understanding what is behaviour and where behaviours come from. They build behaviour conceptually by looking at it through two broad dimensions- individual and systemic. Under individual dimensions, he discusses nudge theories and paternalistic policy models and behaviour through its inherently individual choice aspects. Under systemic dimensions, they explore the sociological and political-economy contexts of behaviour. They argue that as much as one may think that one chooses one’s behaviour, it is not really a result of individual decision-making only. It is ingrained in deeper contexts of culture, political economy, societal norms and institutions. Even if an individual behaves out of choice, the system decides the list of options available. They assert that the agent-structure binary is a problematic conception and calls for a dialectic, inclusive and integrative approach. Therefore, working on both the agent (individual) and structure (system) coterminously is the need of the hour rather than isolating them in the policy.

            The authors’s primary postulation is that individual behaviour is consequential in the climate crisis. They call for the governance of individual behaviour towards sustainable choices and lifestyles. They discuss the required models of governance at great analytical depth. They call for a polycentric, multilayered and multi-faceted model of governance which creates an ecosystem of transformation, the last peg of their analytical framework. This they define as the ‘combination of cultural change and shifting social norms, alongside interventions by institutions and through the market’. Through this ecosystem, they combine individual action that feeds into simultaneous systemic change. Although their analytical framing is robust, the definition of ecosystems of transformation looks rather weak, or not radical enough. The current climate crisis calls for nothing less than a radical change that is, if a change is not radical, it will not be transformative enough. Their allegiance to market interventions also raises doubts regarding the nature of the transformative change he is theorizing. Moreover, their analytical framing could have been made more eloquent by providing practical instances from across the world. The text is heavy on ideas but fails to provide a real-time picture to the reader as to how would this ecosystem of transformation look like. 

The book discusses important debates. As I said earlier, individual behaviour is bound to become very important in the climate policy architectures of all nation-states in the coming times. This raises important questions about how an individual’s actions factor in the national and global targets and responsibilities through questions of quantification, monitoring and verification. However, behaviour here is understood as synonymous with consumption. In my opinion, consumption as an economic activity is just a subset of an individual’s behaviour, attitude and beliefs towards the climate crisis, the environment and various allied issues. A sustainable way of living is much more than consumption behaviour and is a product of the right awareness, education and information. Not just that, it is also a product of the environmental ethics and beliefs of the society, the role of religious ideas and obligations towards the environment and how new forms of knowledge on climate science are understood and inculcated. A conceptual distinction between a sustainable way of life and sustainable consumption practices, and how each can be addressed in policy was missing in the text. Any discussion on individual behaviour should not discount the role of educational institutions and civil society in spreading awareness, information and societal values on the environment.

The text does not bring into its discussion aspects of the political economy that have an important bearing on individual behaviours and choices. This includes questions of governmental budgets and subsidies to unsustainable and large carbon-emitting sectors, finance and private investment decisions, treatment of powerful energy lobbies and multinational corporations and questions of balancing between environmental protection, poverty alleviation and development. Additionally, talking about change through a theoretically sound and analytically robust model is one task, but designing the pathways and transitions is the next important task. There are many academicians who are working not only on questions of low-carbon and sustainable pathways but also on how to make these transitions just. 

Thus, the book is very relevant today. India, for instance, was one of the first countries in the world to initiate a mission known as the LiFE mission (Lifestyle for Environment) in October 2022 to promote sustainable consumption practices and target climate-friendly behaviour through an IEC (information-education-communication) styled campaign. By leveraging several lessons from previous IEC-styled campaigns such as the Swachcha Bharat Abhiyan, it seeks to bring about a movement towards sustainability in the lives of the people. Such policies are going to become a common practice across the world in the coming times. This attests to the fact that Newell, Daley and Twena’s ideas in this book are not only relevant in these coming times, but will also need to be further explored and developed for bringing into practice. 

(Image taken from- freepik.com)