From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action

The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Climate Action 2024-06, Vol.3 (1), p.46-8, Article 46
Main Authors: Pizziol, Veronica, Tavoni, Alessandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
706/689/159
706/689/2788
706/689/694/682
Behavior
Carbon
Climate action
Climate Change
Climate Change Management and Policy
Cost control
Earth and Environmental Science
Electric vehicles
Emissions
Environment
Environmental Economics
Environmental Politics
Equilibrium
Fossil fuels
Intervention
Norms
Paris Agreement
Perspective
Public policy
Renewable resources
Social change
Social interactions
Social Policy
Sociology
Tariffs
Tax increases
Technology adoption
Vegetarianism
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This article takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, the article identifies potential conceptual limitations and proposes fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.
ISSN:2731-9814
2731-9814
2731-3263
DOI:10.1038/s44168-024-00131-3