Structural change and individual behavior change
Social action for sustainability and the protection of nature often aims, in one way or another, at changes to social structures. Whether the actions are led by researchers, activists, or technocrats, the goal of sustainability is pursued through objectives of getting better governance, better social organization, better laws, policies and regulations, or better markets. When, for example, an NGO promotes community-based natural resource management, typically much of its effort focuses on helping that community to develop and/or strengthen its organization and governance. When a researcher creates knowledge on a threatened species and on how the actions of human beings impact that species, it is often with the hope that that knowledge will one day contribute to better policies and better management actions. The strategy in these kinds of approaches is to target what can be called “structural change”.
There is another strategy that aims not at structural change, but at changing the behavior of individuals. The anti-littering campaigns that began in many Western countries in the 1960s, and the know-your-environmental-footprint and green labelling efforts of more recent years are good examples. They attempt to achieve environmental outcomes by motivating individual behavior change.
Debates between individualist and structuralist perspectives and strategies are useful insofar as they help to expose the weakness of a singular focus. Strategies that emphasize individual responsibility are criticized for distracting people from the benefit that powerful actors receive from the current global capitalist system and from the need for systemic change. And strategies that emphasize the need for structural change are criticized for removing agency so far from the realm of individual action as to make positive change seem impossible.[i]
However, I see these two perspectives not so much as antagonistic competitors as two necessary components of meaningful change. Concerted strategic action toward sustainability in the real world often combines the two strategies. For example, structural change is often pursued as a means of coercing or incentivizing individual behavior change, such as when payments for ecosystem services programs attempt to change markets and government budgets (structural change) to thereby change financial incentives that in turn motivate individual behavior change. Despite the fuzziness, overlap and multipronged nature of real world environmental social action, and despite the false dichotomy that is sometimes painted between individual and structural change, understanding our efforts as targeting these two categories of change is a helpful way of thinking about our objectives and strategies.
A third strategic target
However, there is a third, underappreciated strategic target: cultural change. To be clear, I’m referring here to culture not as the arts, but culture in the broad, anthropological sense: the complex and evolving totality of how a community of people behave and think. Culture encompasses the shared values, practices, rules of behavior, knowledge, and worldviews that provide the “normative glue”[ii] that allows a group to exist and to persist. It is manifested in social life, shared conversations, and communal patterns of thought and action.
Cultural change happens in part through individual actions becoming habits, and shared habits eventually becoming social norms. When our strategies that target individual behavioral change take the next step and attempt to steer new patterns of behavior into becoming not only the habits of many individuals, but an embedded feature of the social fabric, then we have begun to dabble in cultural change.
Seth Godin, guru of marketing for social change, has a shorthand way of thinking about culture and how to change it: “people like us do things like this”. This phrase suggests that a strategy targeting cultural change involves getting people to identify with a common idea (the people like us part), and encouraging those people to adopt a shared behavior (the do things like this part).
Three strands for targeting cultural transformation: Knowledge, discourses, and communal life
While the scaling up and entrenching of shared habits is part of how culture changes, culture is more than just the sum total of individual behavior. Culture encompasses shared values, knowledge, conceptual frameworks, and worldviews, and has a life of its own that is distinct both from institutional structures and from accumulated individual action.
One strand of a cultural change strategy is the generation and mobilization of knowledge. Engaging in the realm of knowledge is important not only for the possibility that it might inform policies (structural change), and influence how individuals think and act in relation to a particular problem (individual behavior change), but also for the possibility of shaping the way we collectively think about the world and our place in it.
Another component in targeting culture change is to engage in the discourses of society. The conversations and other types of formal and informal communication that people participate in help to maintain and reinforce, and sometimes to shift and undermine, their collective understandings and ways of thinking. Across a spectrum, from high level policy debates over international action on environmental challenges down to water cooler conversations about the latest forest fires, engaging in discourses is part of how culture is created, particularly when those conversations go beyond the details of a particular issue to examine values, methodology, and ideas. In other words, the conversations that have the greatest impact on culture are those that examine our conceptual frameworks.
What is needed is a change not only in how people en masse think about particular issues, but in the fundamental cultural concepts, principles, and values that shape how they think and act. Click To TweetWhat is needed is a change not only in how people en masse think about particular issues, but in the fundamental cultural concepts, principles, and values that shape how they think and act. This means that engaging at the level of the intellect—through generating and mobilizing knowledge and through discourse on conceptual frameworks—is not enough. Engaging with the spiritual, social, and emotional dimensions of communal life is also important. This is why the arts can be so powerful. (Did I imply above that the arts aren’t important? I hope not.) Culture is much more than just the arts, but the arts are culture’s energy.
Proclaiming prescriptions vs. participating in honest conversations
There is a moral danger in consciously embracing a strategy that includes explicitly trying to change culture. Are we convinced that we know the “right direction” that culture should move? Does our organization, network or coalition see itself as the doctor diagnosing society and administering the correct prescription?
For me, the kind of culture that I want to live in is one in which the people and organizations in that culture are in dialogue together about what direction we want to go. For that vision of a culture, the diagnosis and prescription model of social action is a poor fit. Yes, I and organizations that I’ve worked with over the years—we have ideas about what’s wrong in the world and what should be done to fix it, and it is important for individuals, communities, organizations and networks who similarly have ideas to share and promote them. But part of how this is done is by engaging in open and honest dialogue with others about what the problems and opportunities might be, and how those problems and opportunities connect with collective values, conceptual frameworks, and culture. That means not only sharing our ideas, but listening to and engaging with the ideas of others. In this way, conscious cultural dialogue becomes not only a means toward cultural change but is itself part of the change we hope to effect.
So keep talking and keep listening.
[i] For a recent exploration of individualist vs. structuralist perspectives in the arena of climate action, a recent episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation podcast Future Tense had some insightful guests.
[ii] Tichy, N.M. 1983. Managing organizational transformations. Human Resource Management, 22(1‐2), pp.45-60. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930220108.
Recent Comments