The work is led by Tom Crompton, WWF-UKs “Change Strategist”.<\/span><\/div>\n\n
Crompton’s first publication, Weathercocks and Signposts<\/a><\/em><\/span>, in 2008, was a tortuous read. Essentially it asserted that environmental campaigns that asked people to do easy steps for shallow reasons like saving money or looking good (aka green consumerism) probably wouldn’t be able to leverage those easy behaviours into harder behaviours. To do that we should probably be appealing to deeper values.<\/span><\/div>\n\n
In 2009 he wrote Simple and painless – The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning.<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n\n
Here he claimed that “If those in government, business or the third sector persist in advocating ‘simple and painless’ behavioural changes as a meaningful response to today’s most pressing environmental challenges, this must be because they are persuaded that such changes will encourage the adoption of other, and particularly other more ambitious, behaviours.”<\/em><\/span> <\/span><\/div>\n\n
[That sounds like a straw man argument, but we’ll let it go. He does conceded that many campaigns don’t aim for spillover effects “For example installing loft insulation”.]<\/span><\/div>\n\n
By spillover he means the assumption that an easy behaviour like recycling might lead to a harder behaviour like leaving the car at home. <\/span><\/div>\n\n
[My comment: I don’t know any campaigner who operates on this principle, do you? Not only is there little evidence for spillover effects, but it would be an unprofessional program design practice. There’s another kind of spillover, of course, “vertical spillover”, where going along to a workshop about solar panels DOES make it more likely that a person will install solar panels. But I don’t think he’s talking about that.]<\/span><\/div>\n\n
In order to encourage spillover he suggests environmental campaigners should make clear the environmental arguments behind new behaviours [ie. not “saving you money” but “saving rainforests”], and to frame around values [like providing “a safe world for our children”].<\/span><\/div>\n\n
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