SOCIAL INSTRUMENTS

COUNTRIES OUTSIDE THE ‘USUAL’ OECD

4.6 SOCIAL INSTRUMENTS

4.6.1 Social instruments for behavioural change

Social instruments are applicable to situations in which government aims to raise people’s awareness and influence, or indeed change, people’s attitudes and behaviour, and where ‘command and control’ and economic instruments are deemed either inadequate on their own, or even inappropriate or undesirable. Social instruments are based on interaction and communication among stakeholders, with or without the direct participation of the government. While there are many possibilities for intervention through social instruments, it is difficult to ensure that the chosen instruments will indeed be effective in achieving behavioural change.

This is because people are triggered and motivated by any number of very diverse factors and circumstances, including, for example, social status and aspirations, accepted norms of behaviour, the broader societal context including the media, a sense of agency (the belief that our actions matter) and daily habits.¹²⁸ In other words, what people actually do with their waste depends on a complex interplay of factors and circumstances, which may not necessarily be within the reach or the sphere of influence of the waste management department.

A useful framework for designing initiatives that aim to change people’s behaviour consists of four complementary elements, as shown in Figure 4.4; to be successful, an initiative needs to combine actions from all four elements.

Figure 4.4 The ‘4Es’ framework for designing initiatives to influence (environmental) behaviour¹²⁹

Catalyse is the package enough to break a habit and kick start change?

Enable (Make it easier)

Exemplify (Lead by example) Encourage

(Give the right signals) Engage

(Get people involved)

In order to capture people’s attention effectively and raise their interest, it is essential for social instruments to take as a starting point the ‘sense making’ of the citizens and their realities – their lives and surroundings.

Furthermore, as many officers in national and local authorities have experienced and research evidence consistently shows, information alone is seldom sufficient to bring about the desired and lasting change in people’s behaviour. While information and instruction are necessary, it takes engaging people at a level deeper than intellectual understanding to prompt them into action.¹³⁰ Also, encouraging people to adopt new patterns of behaviour while not invading their freedoms is a challenging task, with possible political implications.

In addition to actions of reaching out towards the public, government agencies and organizations have at their disposal a ‘powerful, symbolic and highly visible signal of changing norms’ in society if they exemplify the desired behaviour and thereby lead by example. For the credibility of any policy, there is no substitute for ‘walking the talk’, as stated in the 2006 UK Government report of a telling title: ‘I will if you will. Towards sustainable consumption’.¹³¹ Waste segregation at source and, particularly, public procurements towards sustainable, green choices, are some typical examples. In the latter case, governments can include requirements of design for sustainability into their public procurement rules and thereby directly deploy their purchasing power to encourage and support manufacturers (and importers) who adopt such approaches.¹³²

128 For critical overviews of the models and theories of change, see for example, Jackson (2005), Darnton (2008) and Shove (2010), listed in Annex A, Chapter 4, Social instruments.

129 DEFRA (2005). Securing the future – delivering UK sustainable development strategy. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/

file/69412/pb10589-securing-the-future-050307.pdf Examples of using the 4Es model can be found in Case Study 3 on food waste, after Chapter 3, and in Table 6.5.

Various other approaches exist to the design of interaction and communication with citizens and other stakeholders; see, for example, Windahl, S., B. Signitzer & J.T. Olson (2009). Using Communication Theory: An Introduction to Planned Communication, 2nd ed. Sage Publications, California, U.S.

130 Heath & Heath (2011)

131 Sustainable Consumption Roundtable (2006)

132 See Topic Sheet 3 on sustainable consumption and production, found after Chapter 2.

Waste governance 167

Design of concrete activities from the basket of social instruments requires specialist knowledge of social marketing¹³³ – something that is probably not readily available in a waste management department. This is an area where engineers and public health officials working in the field of waste management would greatly benefit from contributions from sociology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neurosciences, and other related fields that corporate marketing commonly utilizes for its purposes. Admittedly, marketing budgets of governments are incomparably lower than those of corporations; yet governments have not fully exploited the possibilities that collaboration with civil society members could create in this area. For example, in African cities, governments often work with NGOs and community-based organizations to carry out campaigns incorporating a variety of tools – informal meetings with the community and its leaders, informative posters, music and dramatic plays on the radio. In Bologna Province, Italy, once the infrastructure was installed, door- to-door visits by the municipality’s advisory teams have worked particularly well to increase waste segregation at source. In Austria, street theatre has been used to raise environmental awareness. In many cases, gatherings where people engage in a dialogue within their communities (rather than reflecting on their environmental habits and behaviour individually, on their own) have proven to be very useful, as they tend to enhance people’s sense of community and their common interests. Announcements of public events and other information are increasingly being shared through social media; this trend is very likely to continue and gain pace. Also, governments can collaborate with schools and universities in projects soliciting students’ opinions about sustainability and what it takes for them to engage in, for example, reuse of products or segregation of their waste for recycling. In any case, the form of any campaign needs to be suitable and fit in with the local culture and customs.

© Bhushan Tuladhar

Educational Material for Awareness Raising “Let us get together Educating women on composting, Nepal.

to create a waste free environment”, Sri Lanka.

4.6.2 Information-based instruments

Targeted information provision including non-binding guidance

¹³⁴

The prerequisite for any effort to change behaviour related to a certain subject is being aware of the subject and its implications — simply put, knowing about it in the first place. This is how environmental movements started in the past; in the 1960s and 1970s these movements began with learning about oil spills, the effects of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) on wildlife, urban air pollution, ozone layer depletion by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), atmospheric nuclear testing, ocean dumping of toxic and radioactive waste and other human activities imparting adverse effects on the natural environment. Similarly, awareness of the impacts of uncollected waste on health, or awareness of the finite nature of material resources, or awareness of the limits of the assimilative capacity of Earth’s ecosystems constitutes the first step towards any kind of action related to waste management. Around the world, a wide range of activities has been organized to provide information to citizens and other waste generators, on, for example, waste segregation at source or similar

133 This term is used in one of the models of behavioural change.

134 This instrument is very different from reporting requirements that legally oblige waste generators and handlers to keep records and report to the government.

environmental behaviour, with the idea: if people are well-informed, they will follow through and adopt the behaviour promoted by the information activity.¹³⁵ Well, in fact, they will not — or rather, most of them will not, due to an array of factors and circumstances interfering with the person’s internal pathway from awareness and knowledge to actual behaviour, as said above.

For information-based instruments to have any chance of success, the waste-related information has to bear some relevance to people’s daily realities and concerns. Otherwise, it will lose out among diverse competing claims on citizens’ attention and limited (free) time. For those members of the public who do engage in the process and pay attention to the information provided, if they are already aware of areas of ambiguity and public debate taking place in the media, they will not simply accept information that is presented as definitive and simplistic. Experience also teaches that the chance of success generally tends to be higher if people engage within their communities, rather than on their own.

In addition to education and awareness raising on the importance and benefits of reuse, reduction and recycling, information is also needed in the form of instruction on how exactly to segregate waste – which products and materials belong to recyclables and which do not. Information can be provided on the products themselves, so that citizens know that the product is suitable for recycling and ought to be segregated from other waste.

Box 4.20 provides some examples of illustrations promoting 3Rs.

BOX 4.20 3RS LOGOS AND MESSAGES

¹³⁶

Source: https://vienna-wv.com/portal/city-

information/recycling/ Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:Recycle001-perc.svg Source: Paper Recycling Promotion Center, Japan; http://www.prpc.or.jp/menu03/

cont09.html

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:Tidyman-glass-recycling.svg Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_

Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_

Directive

Source: http://www.kronenbourg.com/1er- brasseur-France/actualites/

responsabilite-solidaire/Pages/

Kronenbourg-soutient-une-politique- de-traitement-durable-des- emballages.aspx#.Vc2e94v_9-U

Source: e-Stewards Certification Program, USA, http://e-stewards.org;

http://www.ban.org Source: Novelis South America, Brasil, http://www.novelis.

com/en-us/pages/novelis-recycling-capabilities.aspx

Source: http://www.cleanup-sa.co.za

135 This was often done based on the rational choice model of human decision-making, which has been strongly criticized and largely replaced by other, more empirically confirmed models. In addition, rational choice model often neglects the historical and contextual (irrational) factors that influence decision-making.

136 http://www.keepcalmandposters.com/poster/keep-calm-and-throw-garbage-in-the-dustbin

Waste governance 169

Also, citizens can be informed about the producer’s involvement in an official recovery scheme, such as the

‘Green Dot’ scheme for packaging, which originated in Germany but is now active in 28 countries (Box 4.21).

BOX 4.21 RECOGNIZABLE SYMBOL OF AN EPR SCHEME

The ‘Green Dot’ logo on packaging means that the producer has paid a financial contribution to the national organization for packaging recovery that has been set up and authorized in accordance with the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive 94/62 and the respective national law. As of 2015, organizations in 28 countries are using the Green Dot as a financing symbol to facilitate organization of a system for collection, sorting and recovery of discarded (mainly household) packaging.¹³⁷

Various information-based instruments have been used to, for example, give visibility to best- or worst- performing companies; such instruments are popularly known as ‘name and fame’, or ‘name and shame’, respectively.¹³⁸

BOX 4.22 JAPAN’S ‘TOP RUNNER’ PROGRAMME

¹³⁹

This programme sets energy efficiency standards for products in 21 categories (for example, vending machines, air conditioners, TVs) in Japan. On a regular basis, officials test all the products available on the Japanese market in a given category, determine the most efficient model, and make that model’s level of efficiency the new baseline. Manufacturers have the obligation to make efforts to achieve the new baseline within four to eight years. Products that meet the energy efficiency standard receive a Top Runner label.

If a manufacturer does not meet the target or fails to make a good faith effort, this fact gets publicized.