We’ve just completed our latest piece of work, The Common Cause Handbook.

It’s a practical and accessible introduction to the importance of values and frames for organisations working towards a more sustainable and just society.

The Common Cause Handbook makes the case that civil society organisations can find common cause in working to engage and strengthen intrinsic values  - such as concern for others, social justice, creativity, self-acceptance, and a connection with nature – whilst working to diminish the importance of extrinsic values – for example, social status, material success, image, wealth, and power.

The handbook was inspired by WWF’s groundbreaking report Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values and its sister publication, Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global Poverty. We’ve worked with WWF, Oxfam and a wide range of civil society organisations to develop, trial and produce our guide. We hope you’ll enjoy the result.

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The Scotsman printed a two page spread in the lead up to the Scottish election warning that the SNP’s target for 100% renewable electricity by 2020 would ‘wreak significant damage on the Scottish Labour market’, citing as evidence a report called ‘Worth The Candle?’ by Verso Economics, which concluded that for every job created in the renewable sector, 3.7 are destroyed elsewhere in the economy.

But this head-line grabbing statistic, which has been picked up at full tilt by nimbies and climate sceptics, deserves some closer scrutiny.

The authors, Tom Miers and Richard Marsh, arrive at their astonishing conclusion by totting up the financial support for the renewables industry (supposedly some £1.4bn), estimating how many jobs this sum of money could create if it was spent elsewhere in the economy (10,000, they claim), and then contrasting this with the number of jobs currently existing in the renewable sector (a measly 2,700, say Verso).  Even at first glance this is a static analysis of a dynamic system, which fails to recognize the benefits that accrue from being a first mover in an emerging and competitive market. Miers’ ignorance of this reality is astonishing: “If you build up an industry on subsidies,” he writes, “almost by definition there will be no economic benefit.”

But this is just the beginning. Verso’s estimate of the number of the people currently employed in the renewables industry (2,700) is wildly out of step with other estimates in the field.  For example, RenewableUK’s recent report ‘Working for a Green Britain’ found that there are four times as many people (10,800) employed in the wind, wave & tidal industries alone. Together these industries only account for 47% of the support given under the Renewables Obligation – meaning that the real number of jobs sustained by it is likely to be much higher.  How did Verso get it so wrong?  Well, RenewableUK reached their figure by surveying companies across the industry, asking them how many people they employed in various parts of their business. Verso, by contrast, simply took the ONS’s figure for the number of people employed by companies whose main business is electricity production and multiplied it by the proportion of electricity that we get from renewables.

One obvious pitfall of this approach is that different types of generation require different numbers of people (and several studies have shown that energy efficiency and renewables generate more jobs per KWh than fossil fuel and nuclear industries).  But the more fundamental problem with Verso’s estimate is that they have completely misunderstood how the ONS’s statistics for the electricity industry work – specifically, that they only include those people directly working on a power plant; a figure of 25,000.  In other words, the people employed delivering coal to Longannet powerstation won’t be included in that figure. Neither will the people who work on jack-up barges for offshore turbines, those who erect the turbines, or – most importantly – the people who maintain and repair them!

The credibility of the research crumbles further, when it emerges that Verso have included the exemption of renewables from the Climate Change Levy as a direct subsidy to the industry.  Given that the Climate Change Levy is a tax designed explicitly to discourage the burning of carbon-intensive fossil fuels, and raise funds to plough into cleaner forms of energy, it would seem rather daft for it to apply to renewable energy.

As such the Verso Economics study both overestimates the level of financial support flowing into the renewables sector, and underestimates the jobs that are likely to be created in the sector.  But a far greater flaw in the analysis is that it completely ignores the wider costs and benefits associated with our energy choices.

What, for example, will be the cost of allowing climate change to spiral out of human control? Of rebuilding homes and buildings after ever more frequent storms and floods? What will be the cost of treating respiratory diseases caused by opencast coal mining; of cleaning up the oil spills from ever-riskier deep sea oil wells; providing clean water to families when toxic chemicals from the gas fracking process leach into our water table? What will be the cost to the economy of remaining hopelessly vulnerable to fossil fuels price-rises and shortages, and of falling behind in the fast-moving and competitive market for low carbon power?

Fortunately, Verso’s back-of-the-envelope calculations are wrong about jobs. But decisions about the direction of our energy system should not, in any case, be made on the basis of such crude, narrowly focused and short-sighted cost-benefit analyses.  Afterall, how do you put a price on human life?  Or the extinction of a species?  On the hardship that will be suffered by hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the droughts, floods and resource conflicts that climate change will exacerbate?

As well as being a shoddy piece of research, the Verso study makes the fundamental error of assuming that we have a credible choice about whether or not to embrace renewable energy.  From the perspective of long term energy security and social justice it is the only choice.

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Behaviour change is the new black – although the idea has been around for a while it is increasingly the mantra of those working on climate change. Funders are interested in it. Government swears by it. Researchers puzzle over it. Voluntary organisations take it as their agenda. What’s not to like?

Lots.

What’s a behaviour change programme?

Behaviour change programmes identify problem behaviours in a target group or audience and then devise interventions that might bring about change. The programmes are usually devised by professionals and the approach is rooted in cognitive behavioural and social psychology where it has had some success in tackling health issues. The approach is usually a rational one, aimed at tackling the most obviously soluble aspects of a problem.

The theoretical models that lie behind behaviour change programmes are often complicated but they are rarely concerned with feeling, with the subjectivity of the individual who is targeted or in the relationship of that individual to the person making the intervention. The client or audience remains ‘other’, a problem to be solved. And although processes of change are posited they generally focus solely on the behaviour that has been designated problematic. The formula is usually ‘we’ need ‘them’ to change their lightbulbs/take the bus/waste less food. The interventions suggested range through the provision of information and exemplars, processes of rational learning, rewards and disincentives. DEFRA’s 4 ‘E’s model is an framework from the environmental sector.

Are behaviour change programmes likely to be helpful in tackling climate change? It is of course welcome to see attention being turned from technological solutions to ones that involve people, but behaviour change programmes are fraught with difficulties – from the question of who defines a behaviour as problematic through to whether the right questions can be addressed in this way.

Behaviour as symptom

As a psychotherapist I see problem behaviour as a symptom. It’s often what brings someone into the consulting room – ‘I get angry all the time’, ‘I’m scared of dogs’, ‘I’m drinking too much’ – but these are surface phenomena. Something has given rise to them. Somewhere there are disturbed relationships, unrealistic dreams, defensive solutions to earlier difficulties and a miserable and confused knot of feelings. Without exploring and understanding the complex nexus of desire, identity, history and relationship the symptom is unlikely to give way. Rational explanations of the symptom’s dysfunction or suggestions of sensible alternatives do not often have much effect. And if they do, another symptom pops up somewhere else. Overeating is replaced by anorexia. Rage at the children reappears as depression and a stomach ulcer.

The behaviours that are targeted in climate change interventions – leaving appliances on standby, exceeding the speed limit, wasting food – are also symptoms. Behind them lie our disturbed relationship to the rest of the natural world, our fragile identities dependent on ‘stuff’, our anxious preoccupations with security and status. Impacting on each one are the decisions of governments and corporations, the predations of marketers, the values of the dominant culture and the opinions of our peers. And just as with psychological symptoms, if one behaviour is vanquished another pops up to take its place. In climate change work, this is what economists describe as the rebound effect. The money saved by insulating the loft and swapping out the light-bulbs results in the thermostat being turned up and the lights being left on for longer, or is blown on a flight to Madrid. The underlying problem remains.

What’s needed for personal change?

Psychotherapy argues that in order to change, we have to talk about what is wrong. It relies on creating a safe relationship where conversation is possible. We have to accept the painfulness of mixing everything up, questioning our assumptions and letting go of solutions that have seemed sweet and seductive but have also been damaging. We have to face inner conflict and ambivalence and accept that our rationalisations may hide unconscious destructiveness.

In making the changes that climate change demands the same holds true. We have to talk. We have to feel safe to talk. We have to face grief, pain, anxiety and guilt. We have to accept that the problem is bigger than we hoped and will ask more of us than we feel able to give. We have to deal with conflict with family, friends and colleagues. We have to find the courage to act socially and politically – inside and maybe outside the law – in defence of the future and of justice. Words like empathy, compassion, relationship and respect, that are fundamental to the practice of psychotherapy and which make it possible to face this bigger picture are missing from the language of behaviour change. Its focus is rational and on the part not the whole, on the simple not the complex, on the doable not the necessary.

Being ‘nudged’ towards the recycling bin or rewarded financially for installing PV is unlikely to deliver on the bigger agenda but does this mean that behavioural change programmes are all pointless? It would be a brave person who would say so. Undoubtedly the behaviours targeted are ones that need to change. But the risks of this approach are many. Although it deals with people and acknowledges some aspects of their psychology:

• It doesn’t reflect the complexity of individuals’ psychological difficulties about climate change and the range of feeling engendered by the subject.
• Its models of change are cognitive and don’t deal with the affective domain and the whole person.
• It doesn’t reflect our deep implication in the socio-cultural-economic system that has caused the problem.
• By encouraging us to approach others as units whose behaviour needs to be manipulated into the required pattern it may diminish our sense of ourselves and other people as responsible citizens. It may infantilise us.
• It avoids the need for political engagement and lets the big culprits off the hook.
• Its focus on small, achievable steps may avoid deeper engagement or produce despair at the scale of the problem.
• Its focus on financial rewards may reinforce counter-productive materialistic values. (See the Common Cause report).

Well – that’s a big charge sheet – argue back someone – let’s have a conversation about this.

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h/t Greenfyre, we’re glad he’s back.

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There is no shortage of authoritative documents advocating for a low carbon future. Nick Stern gave us a price tag for decarbonisation. The Sustainable Development Commission (RIP) gave us ‘scenarios’ and ‘pathways’ to a low carbon future. And dozens of engineering and policy analyst groups have put together compelling estimates of the sorts of energy technologies that might power our low carbon world.

So, we have some pathways to a low carbon future, we know what types of machines might be likely to inhabit that future, and we are told that it will be cheaper if we get on with this low carbon future sooner rather than later. This is all valuable information, and activists have made good use of it to persuade people to take climate change seriously. But does any of it tell us anything about what this ‘future’ will be like?

Of course it does not – and cannot. Because valuable as these analyses are, they are like the stage directions and lighting plan for a play that has no script. We know the future will be different, but the gaping hole in the middle of the low carbon future conversation is what, exactly, a low carbon future means.

As Paul Kingsnorth has emphasised, the standard response to this dilemma has been to try and find increasingly clever ways of ‘selling’ a version of the future that looks a bit like today but has less carbon in it. But ‘selling’ climate change and a low carbon future will fail, because the future is no more a product to be promoted and sold than love or fascination.

The received wisdom is that we need a ‘positive vision’ instead of doom and gloom. As Jon Alexander has pointed out, activists are fond of saying that when Martin Luther King inspired his followers to rise up against racism he told them that he had a dream – not that he had a nightmare. But this is missing the point. Crucially, he did not tell them that he had a series of targets for reducing the percentage of racism over the next fifty years, he told them a story about the future.

The lack of human ownership over what a low carbon future will be like is blocking any progress on public engagement with climate change. There is an abundance of consumption stories to fill our hopes and dreams with – but precious little in the way of sustainability hooks to hang our aspirations on. Even the most committed campaigners can only subsist on numbers, models and technical specifications for so long.

What is fascinating is that a version of the problem we face in the UK is being played out all over the world. In Uganda, where I have been conducting interviews with climate change communicators (journalists, activists, policy-makers), one of the major missing pieces of the puzzle is that there is no clear sense of what ‘sustainable development’ means. Sure, there are indicators you can identify, Millennium Development Goals to meet. But the problem is that no-one really knows what sustainable development means, in human terms.

Will life for Ugandans in the future be just a low-carbon version of Western industrialisation, with hydro-electric dams instead of coal-fired power plants? Or will they choose a different model –one that plays to the strengths of Uganda, its lush, fertile land and astounding variety of food stuffs?

Where the average Ugandan sees themselves in 20 years time is every bit as important in determining whether ‘development’ will be ‘sustainable’ as the MDGs.

In Uganda, a new initiative has just been launched by a local NGO (National Association of Professional Environmentalists) called ‘Sustainability Schools’. Taking the broadest possible interpretation of sustainability, Sustainability Schools are a kind of structured community empowerment scheme, aimed at promoting sustainable values and ethics through increasing public participation in decision making on issues like oil governance, water management and forest preservation.

The focus is as much on building social cohesion among communities, and ‘critical thinking’ as on specific sustainability issues. The logic of the Sustainability School is that only when a group of people know how to work together to hold government or industry to account, will any kind of progress on sustainability issues be achieved. In a way, sustainable development issues are a side effect of the main focus of the programme, which is on building social capital. It is a little bit like Transition Towns, but for subsistence farmers instead of middle class University lecturers.

Sustainability Schools are crucial not just for promoting sustainability issues, but for providing a rare space for citizenship to flourish. Crucially, there is no talk of numbers, budgets or targets. Instead, people are encouraged to share their hopes and dreams for the future, and through this are presented with environmental challenges.

Uganda’s environmentalists are creating a valuable new model of public engagement for sustainability – one from which the West could learn.

hiddenheat.wordpress.com // @AJCorner

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The Government has pledged just £1bn of direct public funds for the GIB – despite a previously anticipated figure of £2bn – and falling far short of the £4-6bn that analysts and campaigners had been calling for.

The Spending Review states that the GIB “will catalyse further private sector investment… so that the impact on the finance gap for low carbon investment is many times the scale of the public contribution.” But a recent report by Ernst & Young recommended the GIB receive minimum public funding of £4-6bn, or else fail to leverage necessary quantities of private sector money.

The Spending Review pledges that “additional significant proceeds from asset sales” will help supplement the £1bn figure, but gives no indication on what these asset sales might be, or the amount of money they will free up.

Also worrying is the timescale under discussion. The Spending Review document fixes a date of 2013-14 for the Green Investment Bank to receive its £1bn capital injection. Why so late? The design and testing work on the precise structure of the GIB is meant to be completed by Spring 2011, presumably in time for primary legislation to be introduced in the Finance Bill expected for April 2011. Anticipating a year to establish the GIB in law seems fair enough; but why then wait an extra year to grant it any funds?

Delaying such funding risks deterring private sector investment, and gives another year of slippage in which the UK can lose first mover advantage in capturing renewable and low-carbon markets. In sum: too little money, delivered too late.

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My conclusions from the charts are:

1. Level of concern

Climate change and the environment in general isn’t a major issue on most people’s radars.  It doesn’t come high in the list when people are thinking about the issues that affects their day-to-day lives. However, it does become more significant when it’s prominent for external reasons: severe weather attributed to climate change; positive media attention (e.g. around the Stern report).  Equally, it can be less of a concern for the opposite reasons. Indeed, the dates for the fieldwork for a number of the charts – early 2010 – have, I believe, reduced some of the scores for action on tackling climate change. So comparisons with 2005 and 2008 look worse than I suspect they would have been if the fieldwork had been a couple of months later.

I think this suggests that people generally don’t reject the idea of climate change as an important issue. When they’re reminded about it, it reappears as something important. But most of the time, most people aren’t affected by it at an emotional level, any more than most people in rich countries are affected emotionally by food security in the global South apart from when starvation makes the TV screens.

2. Level of engagement

MORI’s conclusion on the data about whether climate change is exaggerated is that two in five agree with this. That’s true, but what I think is most interesting is that 71% are in the middle three options: tend to agree / neither agree nor disagree / tend to disagree. Another 3% don’t know.  So only 26% have a strong opinion.  Similarly, on the question about whether people are uncertain what the effects of climate change will be, 79% are in those three options.

We see this often in questions about climate change that give middle-ground options. More people seem to be put off by the heat of the ‘debate’ between climate campaigners and those who reject humans as the cause of climate change. Both sides are seen to be overstating their case; the compromise is assumed to be the correct position.

3. Basis for action

I’ve used the data on slide 18 on a couple of occasions (here, for instance). I think it’s one of the most important findings I’ve seen about the communication of climate change.  While most people think that climate change is caused by humans, that it’s serious, that it requires action, and that that action should be led by governments…  they don’t trust politicians to lead that action.

Either politicians have to get much better at how they talk about climate change, and be much more transparent about how climate taxes are structured.  Or they need help from other people, who can push for action on climate change with much more credibility.

This is post was originally published on ClimateSock​.com.

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It is the beliefs and values that our citizens bring to such difficult debates which puts breath into the inanimate skeleton of scientific knowledge. Censor or mock beliefs, and we are nothing: our knowledge counts for naught. – Mike Hulme

In the latter months of last year and the earlier months of this one, public debate on climate change became particularly charged and divided. The media’s fragmented reporting became more and more confused following a cold Northern hemisphere winter and the CRU email-hack, dribbling out contradictory reports about apparent (later largely disproved) IPCC mistakes, and there seemed to be disagreement between everyone. As an organisation thinking about various ways of communicating climate change, we started thinking about the broad idea of ‘public engagement’ and whether it could usefully be applied to discussing climate change. Public engagement – an umbrella term for a set of different approaches to getting citizens involved in issues to do with pretty much anything, usually related to society or politics – has become a widely used tool in decision-making processes in the last ten years.

In September last year, the Danish Board of Technology initiated an international discussion on climate change – World Wide Views on Climate Change – which involved a total of 4400 people in 38 countries sitting down and talking about what they believed about climate change, emissions targets, the whole issue. We started to wonder about whether you could do something similar but getting scientists participating too, and we stumbled across the consensus conference model, which involved getting citizens and ‘experts’ together on separate panels – the citizens taking charge, the experts inputting when invited. It was like a citizens’ jury, but with a lot more control for the citizens, and a really deliberative process, and we wondered whether it could be used.

Looking back at our original thinking, it was pretty reactive. The debate looked like a mess, so it felt right to suggest an intervention to get everyone talking; to overcome the real disconnect and lack of understanding on all sides – how the scientists think of the public, how the public think of the scientists, and the an endemic problem of media representation of the science. An illustration of this latter point: searching the Press Complaints Commission’s website shows 17 results for the word ‘science’ (a pretty broad thing); of the eight actually related to scientific research, four are about climate change. And these ‘controversies’ portrayed in the media have a real impact – the issue was beautifully graphed recently showing public perception of climate change in comparison with media reports and scientific opinion – unsurprisingly almost an exact match (26%) with media ‘belief in climate change’ (28%), and way off scientific opinion (97%).

So the initial problem seemed to be putting a fragmented debate back together. We, as with other commentators, struggled with how 20 years of progress in raising awareness at a public and political level on the issue had been brought, seemingly, so quickly to its knees. But as we talked more with people who know a lot more about this, and as we thought about it, we happened upon the notion that the issues with the scientists and the media and the public were actually just symptomatic of an underlying sociological problem. In a vague nutshell, this is ‘science in society’ and it’s an argument that’s been made by others. ‘Science’ has been given an elevated position in society, and we are often told, for example, that ‘the science tell us’ that we must do things, without the necessary qualifiers ‘if you consider this a risk’, ‘if you value this and that’, ‘if you want more than a 60% chance of living past the age of 70’ – which make the issue much less cut-and-dried.

Climate change discourse and policy discussion is in fact not just an issue of hard science and weighing up evidence or expert opinion. It may sound like a very basic point to make, but weighing up evidence itself is a subjective task. I thought this recently while reading (‘sceptic’) Nigel Lawson’s rambling An Appeal to Reason – A cool look at global warming. In one of his ‘cool looks’ at the evidence, he had come to the conclusion that as poor countries could be as much as 45 times richer in a hundred years, it didn’t really matter what climatic changes inflicted themselves on them. Not quite as enamoured with neo-liberalism as Lawson, my reaction to exactly the same ‘evidence’ involves a lot more concern. Firstly, it is not at all evident to me that even if this were the case, the miraculous new wealth would be distributed evenly amongst the populations of these countries. Secondly, I consider the increased risk of large changes which could effectively make a place uninhabitable, and the probability of more intense and frequent extreme weather events (posing huge shocks to vulnerable populations), an unacceptable prospect for it to be worth it even if there was an increase in a country’s wealth. But this is effectively a question of values and ideology rather than any science. This was a bit of a revelation.

So the issue is not just about people ‘believing’ in climate change or not, or understanding the science, it’s a whole host of other issues too. I heard Brian Wynne talk this year, and to paraphrase him, he said “science should inform policy, but it often dictates the terms of the debate too. In letting this occur, we are letting science dictate meaning’’. He wasn’t referring to climate change, but we can apply the same thinking to this issue. In discussing ‘dangerous climate change’, or proposing particular policy, we don’t always hear, or even think about, what values or sociopolitical structures are encompassed and reinforced by them. There is hidden meaning in presented information – when the Sun puts the word ‘bender’ in the headline about a gay man, they are condoning a level of homophobia, for example (though this is arguably not so hidden). Mike Hulme similarly touched on the relationship between science and meaning in a Wall Street Journal piece last year;

The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.

In the eyes of a hypothetical self-interested individual – we’ll say she has no children, is in a high income bracket, and lives in Leeds – there is actually little motivation to take action on climate change, or even think about whether it’s ‘real’ or not. In her lifetime, summers may get warmer, floods may get more common in the UK, but she is in a low enough risk group to be relatively unaffected by these things. Trade routes and a lot of produce could be hugely affected by a number of things and exacerbated by climate change, but this is unlikely to be a matter of life and death. Even in worst case scenarios, whereby areas of the world become uninhabitable through resource scarcity and/or conflict, and there are influxes of ‘climate refugees’, she’s not going to be particularly impacted. And these things are huge maybes anyway. ‘Dangerous climate change’ is not going to be here. This ‘we’re all in it together’ thing is actually a bit ‘all animals are equal’ in that ‘some animals are more equal than others’. So what values are we talking about when we talk about climate change? We’re invoking the point that we live in an interconnected world, and that (to varying degrees) we care about the fate of the other people on the planet who aren’t ourselves. But there are those who value these things differently. So, as Mike Hulme continues on to argue in his WSJ piece,

[The fallout from the CRU email hack may] enable science to function in the effective way it must do in public policy deliberations: not as the place where we import all of our legitimate disagreements, but one powerful way of offering insight about how the world works and the potential consequences of different policy choices. The important arguments about political beliefs and ethical values can then take place in open and free democracies, in those public spaces we have created for political argumentation [emphasis added].

As well as the missing discussions about the values involved in climate change science, impacts, and politics, the ‘swifthack’ pulled by the sceptics was enabled by the fragility of people’s engagement with climate change. Climate change has at times had a ‘faddish’ feel about it – it has been a superficial add-on to our lives, rather than – as many are calling for – a rethink of our underlying social structures. Climate change, a complex, ‘wicked’ problem, has not been mainstreamed into our consciousness, leaving policy, science and media assertions of its existence vulnerable. It would be pretty hard for the Sun to run an article about the discovery that gravity didn’t really exist without its whole readership checking the date for April Fools’, for example. But with climate change, the media’s near-monopoly on information has allowed a few the power to make the whole issue a bit farcical. It also doesn’t have a personal ‘hook’ for a lot of people – stories about red wine’s health effects, on the other hand, are easily related to. The media’s power over public knowledge isn’t something noticed only by ‘observers’; PricewaterhouseCoopers recently commissioned a citizens’ jury on the spending deficit, and one expressed sentiment highlighted was participants’ concern about their ‘apparent reliance on the “drip drip” of media announcements to inform’ them.

Public engagement therefore seems a necessary part of conducting the important arguments Mike Hulme refers to. So what does it look like? The most common and basic method of involving the public is the opinion poll – giving decision-makers a glimpse into popular take on issues. However, these are pretty limited in what they can tell you. What does the ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t mind’ response really mean, for example? There can actually be a lot in this response other than a lack of knowledge or indifference; namely, fear and apprehension, or an appreciation for both sides, if the question has not allowed for adequate flexibility. The lack of real engagement or participation shows in the transience of results. Obviously, large events should change people’s minds – consider Nick Clegg’s 64-point approval rating drop in a 3 month period – but it’s also worth considering if people had read everything Nick Clegg had written, and had an honest answer about what he would do and what he would compromise in a coalition government – in other words, been really engaged in Nick Clegg – whether the coalition forming and subsequent policy outcomes would have impacted his approval rating so deeply – regardless of whether it had been so high in the first place.

A step up from this in public engagement is deliberative polling, where members of the public are given information on specific subjects and allowed time to give more detailed and considered responses to questions. And at the other end of the scale are more participatory approaches where public input is an integrated part of a decision-making process – such as consultations, citizens’ juries or consensus conferences. These generally involve a small (10 – 100) group of people being brought together for a period of time (a few hours to a few weeks) and discussing a particular issue or set of issues, sometimes with the input of ‘experts’ or ‘witnesses’. They then produce some sort of report, which is sometimes incorporated in decision making. Consultations have become a recognised part of decision-making, and the citizen’s jury became similarly popular under New Labour. However, they became a somewhat hackneyed concept, viewed by some as little more than political tools, used to legitimise decisions already made, and as PR.  As Matt Nisbett argues (though talking about a US context), these methods are sometimes;

…somewhat analogous to how democracy building is often thought of relative to foreign policy: The U.S. invests in democracy building in countries, but the implicit goal and assumption is that the outcome will lead countries to be direct allies of the U.S. If this doesn’t happen, then democracy building is considered to have failed.

There is, for example, the anecdote about the decision-makers’ reasoning that they had just got the ‘wrong public’ after a citizens’ jury still refused to ‘get on board’ with the idea of GM as the future of Britain’s food.

There are lots of researched benefits to more participatory approaches; psychological and sociological evidence says that when people feel involved and included, they are empowered, more likely to act on issues, and happier – there are both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons to involve citizens in decision-making. But these current methods aren’t allowing enough of this control. Involve, the organisation that coordinated the UK part of the World Wide Views on climate change discussion, recently published a pamphlet Talking for a Change: A Distributed Dialogue Approach to Complex Issues. In it, they propose an evolved version of this kind of participatory approach which isn’t just an obligatory add-on, but a continuous, consistent and iterative process whereby citizens are a critical part of decision making. They highlight the type of complex issues that need these approaches: ones that are inter-generational, international, and uncertain, like climate change. The idea has several benefits. The ‘public’ get a voice, decision-makers hear what the public think. The debate also moves away from its caricatured dichotomy – recognising that the majority of people aren’t on sides. They just have a range of understandings, opinions and related values, which may lack articulation or even recognition. The idea of deeper participatory methods was also proposed by the (late?) Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) earlier this year, and has been discussed by Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Involve’s proposal for distributed dialogue implicates the participation of communities and pre-existent groups – they talk about devolution of participation, launched from the centre but involving a variety of local actors. So you could have church groups and rugby clubs involved in talking about climate change – encouraging people to realistically think about issues in comfortable and natural environments. They also suggest using lots of different approaches. Conscious of impact and effectiveness, it’s recommended that public engagement should be well-promoted, and have a planned method of contributing to policy making. And lastly, the processes should be open and flexible. Talking for a Change gives several case studies, for example ‘participatory budgeting’ (PB) in Brazil, which involves 40,000 people a year in budgetary assemblies to decide on spending. PB has a lot of reported success in decreasing poverty and redistributing resources. Ideas like this should become a model for how we move forward in talking about the complicated issues we’re facing.

To qualify, I recognise that even discussing these ideas is in itself part of a value system. Public engagement of this sort is about a particular view of democracy. It is about valuing the public, for one thing – not just as consumers or voters or audience members but as active participants in society. It is also a tool, for use in reaching goals, such as an active citizenship. And proposing its use in the climate change debate is based on my view that the mess it has become is symptomatic of deeper issues with our society and public debate, including an unhelpful divide between those with ‘knowledge’, and those ‘without’; an inactive and often frustrated citizenship; and a societal avoidance of talking properly about the meaning behind our policies and behaviour. Whether others agree or not with these values isn’t the point; the point is, we should be talking about them.

This is the momentum of democracy. In the long run, it will also be the best thing for science. – Daniel Sarewitz

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On the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles has made some bold claims about ‘human nature’ in introducing the coalition’s household recycling policy. Under the new policy, householders will be rewarded for recycling with points that can be cashed in at ‘local businesses’ such as Marks and Spencer and Cineworld. Bravely summarising decades of behavioural research in just two sentences, Pickles states that:

“There are some basic truths about human nature that the previous government found hard to grasp. If you want people to do something, then it’s always much more effective to give them support and encouragement – a nudge in the right direction – than to tell them what to do and then punish them if they don’t obey.”

He later goes on to claim:

“What’s really important about this scheme is that it treats people like adults. There’s no compulsion to participate, no penalties for opting out. It works because there’s a clear incentive to get involved. You put something in, you get something back. This is the Big Society in action.”

Unfortunately, the one basic truth about human nature that Pickles overlooks is the one that seems most essential for the Big Society: people respond to what others around them are doing, and don’t just behave in a rational, individually beneficial way. If they did, far less people would play the lottery.

Much more important than any individual-level cost/benefit analysis of whether to recycle is whether a particular behaviour is seen as socially acceptable. In several psychological studies, the power of social norms has been demonstrated for environmental behaviours like recycling and home energy management. In a famous example, American researchers showed that energy-hungry households reduced their energy consumption when they had access to information about the average usage in their area. They saw their high-energy use as socially undesirable, and fell into line.

Nobody wants to be seen as the gas guzzler in a neighbourhood full of waste-watchers, so reward or punishment schemes may be missing the point if they are aimed at individuals rather than tapping into the huge potential of social comparisons to generate behaviour change. People are more likely to compete to out-do each other than they are for a few pounds off their supermarket bill, and another recent psychological study showed how important people think it is to be ‘seen to be green’. Shoppers were willing to pay a premium for products with an environmental advantage – although only if they thought that other people were watching.

But there are also deeper reasons for not creating a direct link between recycling rates and financial rewards. Studies by Tim Kasser have shown that people who are highly materialistic are the least likely to act in a pro-environmental way. Paying people to recycle promotes the very value (material gain) that is likely to inhibit more ambitious changes in behaviour, or support for policies that may in fact cost people money in low-carbon taxes.

In short, Pickles’ Big Society recycling plan has no societal component, promotes the environmentally and socially antagonistic value of individual material gain as a reason for recycling, and amounts to paying people to put out their rubbish. Is that the best the Big Society can do?

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A slew of new reports, profiled at a conference organised last Friday by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), fundamentally challenge these myths.

This past week saw the publication of The Offshore Valuation, a major new study supported by a broad consortium of Government and industry bodies and coordinated by PIRC. It is the first report to attempt a full economic valuation of the UK’s offshore renewable energy resource. Its findings have been startling: by developing less than a third of the practical wind, wave and tidal resource around the British Isles, we could become a net electricity exporter, generating by 2050 the electricity equivalent of 1 billion barrels of oil per year. Doing so could bring multiple benefits to the UK: £31 billion of revenues from electricity exports to Europe, 145,000 green jobs, and insurance against fossil fuel price volatility.

Other recent reports compound the evidence that, far from being too small a resource to be useful, renewable energy potential is in fact vast. PriceWaterhouseCoopers published in April a scenario for a 100% renewable energy system covering all of Europe, in order “to show that we can be ambitious in our vision”. Mark Delucchi of Stanford University, speaking at Friday’s conference, presented findings from a recent study that found that “a large-scale wind, water, and solar energy system can reliably supply all of the world’s energy needs, with significant benefit to climate, air quality, water quality, ecological systems, and energy security, at reasonable cost”.

There may be plenty of wind, wave, tidal and solar energy available – but surely, say detractors, it is simply too variable to be useful: ‘but the wind only blows a third of the time…’. In fact, overcoming renewable variability is a well-understood engineering challenge to which many solutions exist. Various speakers at today’s conference discussed prospects for a European supergrid, which would go quite some way towards addressing the problems of variable supply. For example, a low-pressure weather system over Britain, causing wind power output to drop, could be buffered against by importing power from Spanish solar arrays or Norwegian hydro stations. Far from being a pipe dream, this is something that governments are already actively working to build: the new Coalition Government’s agreement contains a pledge to “deliver an offshore electricity grid in order to support the development of a new generation of offshore wind power”. There’s no magic bullet technology here, but the deployment of several technological solutions in unison – also drawing in Demand Side Management measures and new forms of electricity storage – can create as reliable a grid as we have today.

Finally, the cost of renewable energy. Clearly, transforming our energy systems from predominantly fossil sources to predominantly renewable ones will require very large upfront costs. But these costs are in fact sound investments which pay back over the lifetime of the installed infrastructure. Furthermore, a new report commissioned by the European Climate Foundation finds that there is very little difference in cost between having a 40% renewable electricity system and an 80% renewable electricity system. This is hugely significant – effectively meaning that the choice between different energy system outcomes need not be made on the basis of cost differences, but rather on grounds of public acceptability, energy security, job creation and so on. Existing legislation and planning consents mean that we are already on the way to having a 40% renewable electricity system across the EU by the early 2020s. The question is, when will we make the decision to go all-out, and commit ourselves to a fully renewable future?

These new reports show the potential for renewables: the huge size of the potential resource, the opportunities to manage variability challenges, the benefits of a renewable energy system. For these prospects to become reality requires action not in 2050, but now: action to strengthen our 2020 renewable targets and extend them out to 2050, action to catalyse finance for the upfront investment needed, action to develop a European supergrid. Let’s work to make sure that the new Government meets those challenges.

A version of this article also appeared on Left Foot Forward.

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