Inverting the problem of "behaviour change"?

Dear All,

At last night's Southwark Green Party AGM, I had an extremely useful brief chat with Remco, who works in public and stakeholder engagement, about a recent conference he attended where people ended up talking about "behaviour change" and climate change.  He noted that everyone was talking about behaviour change in terms of "we want people to do X", rather than ever considering what it is that we, the people, actually want to do ourselves.

Apparently, his employers were seriously considering adopting the reverse of the usual approach: asking people what it is in their lives that they want to do that will make their lives greener, find out what are the barriers that prevent that happening, and work out how to get round those barriers.  Their understanding is that this approach really empowers and engages people and is what they use in their public and stakeholder engagement work generally [e.g. getting people to consider biotechnologies, dilemmas of medical ethics etc].

I think this is stunning - it's basically where I think Peckham Power has got to in its activities - a more "problem solving" approach, rather than a "solution application" approach.   

I also think that there's considerable skill involved in breaking down what people want into achievable steps, and finding out what it is what people do really want.  It's occurred to me over the last couple of days that we, and TTP and probably all similar groups, basically started by inadvertently inviting people to come up with a wish list of big picture stuff that can't possibly be the starting point for any effective activity.  So at Carl's suggestion, we tried getting people into groups for big picture stuff at the start, only to find that, really, that wasn't what people wanted.  If it had been, they would have taken part.  They didn't, so therefore that wasn't what they really wanted.  Having been at TTP's first event, I could see the same process there - please tell us the wish list that you say you want, and then we'll all be completely unable to do any of it and have to give up, feeling dispirited and puzzled. 

Whereas if the question was "Please tell us what immediate problem you have that you would like to solve right now to make your life greener or more energy efficient", we'd get some realistic, sensible yet still variously challenging problems to solve that people really wanted us to work on, that people would really appreciate, and that we'd all feel good about - because we'd be able to see that we were getting somewhere.  It would mean working with apparently far fewer people, rather than imagining that by trying to do X, we're working with lots of [unidentified] "people in the community", but it would be far more effective.  Coincidentally, we'd also find out how poor most people's understanding of their own energy use actually is, and then try to find out why and how they have that understanding so that we can work out how to work with it. 

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't still be aiming to provide community-owned micro-generation for all in Peckham and Nunhead.  We absolutely should, and should be trying to find ways towards that from where people are at all the time.  But I was really excited by the shared recognition that Remco and I had that solving the energy problems people really have now is the most effective, if not the only, way forward...

Any comments?

bw all

Anna