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5.3.8 Social, Cultural, and Behavioural Norms and Aspirations
Perhaps the most significant barriers to GHG mitigation, and yet the greatest
opportunities, are linked to social, cultural, and behavioural norms and aspirations.
In particular, success in GHG mitigation may well depend on understanding the
social, cultural, and psychological forces that shape consumption patterns.
5.3.8.1 Experience from Energy Efficiency Programmes
Conventional policy development is based on a model of human motivation that
has been widely criticized (Stern, 1986; Jacobs, 1997; Jaeger et al., 1998).
People are assumed to be rational welfare-maximizers and to have fixed values,
which, along with the information and means available to them, determine their
behaviour. Practical analysis of energy efficiency and other GHG mitigation
options often makes the narrower assumption that people are cost-minimizers
(Komor and Wiggins, 1988). Such assumptions are undermined by experience with
energy efficiency programmes. It has long been recognized that consumers do
not necessarily act on their stated values (Maloney and Ward, 1973; Verhallen
and van Raaij, 1981), and fail to take up measures that appear on paper to be
economically worthwhile (Stern, 1986; Komor and Wiggins, 1988). Some of the
reasons, such as energy price uncertainty and transaction costs, have been discussed
elsewhere in this chapter and are consistent with the conventional view of consumers
as “rational actors”. Another important influence on behaviour is
the source and quality of information on mitigation measures (the experiences
of friends and family are trusted more than the advice of industry, retail sales
staff or government) (Anderson and Claxton, 1982; Stern, 1986; Komor and Wiggins,
1988). It is much harder for the “rational actor paradigm” to accommodate
features of human behaviour such as the gap between attitudes and action, the
tendency to adopt behavioural routines rather than to optimize continually the
limited number of variables that individuals typically take into account in
their choices, and the tendency for people to rationalize their choices after
the fact.
The gap between current practice and the economic potential has been characterized
in this chapter as being caused by “barriers”. However, Shove (1999)
argues that the language of potentials, gaps, and barriers is itself an impediment
to finding socially viable solutions for energy saving, and that new, more socially-sensitive
approaches are needed to the analysis of measures, with researchers, industry
actors, and policymakers working closely together. One of the greatest challenges
for GHG mitigation strategies is that, for most people, neither energy saving
nor GHG mitigation is a high priority (see for example, Gritsevich, 2000). Consumers’
decisions about energy use are often motivated less by cost-minimization than
by improving comfort and convenience (Wilhite et al., 2000).
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