Environment and Society Research Unit (ESRU)
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/esru

Dr. Petra Filius
IBN-DBO, Postbus 23, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Introduction

Successive national governments in the Netherlands have taken a strong lead on promoting environmentally conscious behaviour using the mass media. The UK Thatcher government was reluctant to promote environmental policies. A cross-cultural study of the environmental attitudes and behaviour of residents in two cities - Nottingham (UK - population 274 000) and Eindhoven (The Netherlands - population 195 000) - was designed to identify what factors help to persuade people to adopt more sustainable lifestyles.

Questions

• Do residents in Eindhoven engage in more pro-environmental behaviour than those who live in Nottingham?
  
• How do citizens rationalise their responsibilities towards the environment?
  
• What education strategies do policy makers employ to encourage the public to adopt more sustainable lifestyles?
  
• What models of society underpin existing education strategies?

Goal

• To develop an effective education strategy for promoting environmental citizenship informed by social and cultural constraints.

1. PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR IN NOTTINGHAM AND EINDHOVEN

• the level of pro-environmental behaviour is much lower in Nottingham than among Dutch residents - commitment to recycling is low; purchasing of "green products" is low;
  
• 69% of car owners in Nottingham use their cars five days or more each week, 41% in Eindhoven;
  
• no respondent in Nottingham had changed their transport behaviour for "environmental reasons", 13% had in Eindhoven;
  
• members of households exhibiting more pro-environmental behaviour were better educated than average, have higher incomes and more often hold managerial and professional jobs;
  
• government regulation and partnership approaches were thought to be the best ways of addressing environmental problems rather than market-led initiatives, taking individual action or adopting a "fatalistic" approach.

2. RATIONALISING ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

• a powerful moral or normative dimension about what people ought to do - both for the environment’s sake and for the "common good";
  
• considerable concerns about the efficacy of actions - are actions effective and do they achieve their stated goals - both in Nottingham and Eindhoven.
  
• are proposed solutions equitable - do all sectors of society share responsibility?
  
• to what extent can citizens trust governments, industry and institutions to act?
  
• what to believe in the mass media?
  
• a pessimistic view of addressing environmental problems prevails in Nottingham; a more optimistic one in Eindhoven reflecting level of government concern and commitment to the environment;

Overall Dilemma: residents want government and industry to take the lead on environmental problems but do not trust them - how to resolve this dilemma?

3. DECISION-MAKERS AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

- the workshops compared

• A consensus that public alienation and resistance to environmental problems can be attributed to the content and styles of media reporting - the in-effectiveness of mass media campaigns in The Netherlands;
  
• Public Information Strategies based on providing "correct information" ignore the contingent nature of environmental truth;
  
• Nottingham decision makers acknowledged there was not one public but "multiple publics" - in Eindhoven decision-makers worked with a more reductionist model of the public and wanted more authority to be invested in the local state;
  
• the need for a partnership approach to sharing environmental knowledge and power - was stronger in Nottingham than in Eindhoven;
  
• "doing" is more important than "exhortation" - institutions recognise the limitations of a "media driven education strategy" - in situtions need to match their own practices with their environmental rhetoric.

4. IMPLICATIONS FOR URBAN ECOSYSTEM EDUCATION

Reductionist models of public education have limited effectiveness because they construct the individual as being ISOLATED from society. A linear process of exhortation based on offering the "correct information" does not stimulate appropriate lifestyle changes.

Contextualist models of public education construct individuals as SOCIALLY ENGAGED beings whose environmental understanding is contingent on where they live, history of events, social networks, moral issues.

These models also recognise that the way society "works" depends upon a reflexive process of mutual trust through which individuals and structures come to constitute each other. Participatory processes of environmental decision-making can "reconstitute" social relations in reflexive ways that forge mutual trust.

Effective education strategies seeking to promote pro-environmental lifestyles need to work with contextualist models of social change. Strategies will be:

• heterogeneous in nature and content;
  
• localised rather than universal in the scale of delivery;
  
• action led rather than based on exhortation;
  
• supportive of participative democracy;
  
• inclusive rather than exclusive.

Bicycles parked outside Eindhoven railway station