Change can be difficult to achieve. Change on a global scale can be very difficult to achieve – perhaps even impossible. And, despite what we may want to think as campaigners, we may not be in control of all the levers that need to be pulled to achieve the change we want – in fact,
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I went to an interesting talk at the RSA today by James Wallman who has just published a book called ‘Stuffocation’. His basic argument was that in the society of scarcity of around a generation ago, what mattered in life was having more stuff – i.e. in a society of scarcity, materialism is not a
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I was at the Compass Change:How? conference today and was struck by a few things in a discussion we had about ‘why it’s so hard getting people to change’. By this it meant getting members of the public to take action for a more progressive, sustainable (etc.) world. The first thing that struck me was
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This interesting article in the New York Times got me thinking again about something I’d been working on a few years ago – the question of how to we can gain the level of change needed to tackle big global issues like global warming and just what role we as individuals can play in this.
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Here’s our new, improved summary of the social need for Life Squared and what the organisation does to address it… Click here to download the summary.
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In recent days there’s been much discussion about the ‘banned’ advert from the 10:10 climate change campaign, which was withdrawn after it had upset a number of people with its cartoon violence images of environmental campaigners blowing up recalcitrant members of the public. Find out more background on the ad and see the video itself
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Whatever you may think of the coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ idea (and I have my reservations), it needs a certain type of population to make it happen – one that is politically engaged, community-minded and willing to give up time for the greater good. I hate to say it, but this doesn’t sound like modern
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Interesting report from the Institute for Govenment, pulling together some of the evidence for ‘automatic’ behaviour change techniques. Many behaviour change initiatives to date have involved a ‘reflective’ approach (the standard model used by economics), which assumes that people make decisions rationally and will analyse the various pieces of information from politicians, governments and markets,
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Some time ago I produced a paper for ChangeStar questioning whether the strategy of seeking small changes in behaviour from the public on issues such as climate change was the most effective way for environmental and social justice organisations to achieve their (very urgent) goals. You can read it here. This article is worth dusting
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Environmental and other charities are not gaining the change in behaviour from the public that Secrets they need, and the without time has come for a change in our approach to how we communicate with the public. The ChangeStar article in this link argues that we need to take a ‘whole person’ approach to seeking
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