How do we turn every citizen into a conscious and active citizen?

by Hester van Zuthem and Meia Wippoo
WAAG society

How do we get to a point where people not only share concerns, but also act upon them? How do we turn every citizen into a conscious and active citizen?

Over the past two years, we have looked at what and how people, organisations, and governments communicate about climate change (and how these communications are valued) using data analyses and experiments. But, we’ve also worked on practical solutions and tools for behavioural change.

We want to position the ‘climate change agents’ as designers who can be immersed in the world of the target group to really understand what the needs are and what suits people best. In other words: not trying to convince people to adopt a range of ideas, but to adopt to their way of life and change with them.

This year, we will finalise a Behavioural Change Framework, a model that will be developed for ‘change agents’, to frame the situation in which people are willing to change their behaviour. In the model, several existing theories and methods (i.e. co-creation, marketing, and social-psychological) are combined and integrated with the tools for analysis developed within DecarboNet. In the end, it could be used in all kinds of contexts that ask for a behavioural change, not just the climate situation.

More about the work of WAAG: http://waag.org/en/blog/how-can-we-change-our-behaviour