Exploring stakeholder perceptions of behavioural priorities.

Behavioural change is an important delivery lever to achieve the governments environmental and net zero targets. Stakeholders play a key role in helping to achieve these goals and targets, either through their own actions or as delivery bodies or trusted messengers, interacting with their audiences including the general public. Given the complexity and diversity of policies covered under Environment Act and net zero, there is a need for simple and clear messaging on actions that stakeholders and the public can take in supporting delivery of environmental and net zero goals.

Due to the complex nature of the environmental impacts of behaviour change, where any given behaviour impacts multiple environmental endpoints, there is a dearth of previous work to prioritise pro-environment behaviours. We have good confidence in current research around the climate mitigation potential of behaviours (e.g. Ivanova et al., 2020). However, assessing the impact of behaviours on other environmental policy areas (water quality, nature recovery, resource use etc.) is difficult to quantify with the same confidence as these impacts may involve complex systems such as causal loops and positive and negative spillovers.

This work fits into a wider prioritisation workstream. In short, the workstream aims to help Defra officials understand what behaviours contribute to delivery of Defra's environmental goals; how those behaviours can be prioritised for delivery and communications; what methodologies are available for prioritisation; how these methodologies can be applied in Defra and stakeholder context; and how feasible and acceptable such prioritisation is to stakeholders.

A key project under this workstream is a year long academic fellowship. The fellowship project (May 2024 - March 2025) is focused on using behavioural systems thinking to improve policy outcomes. A literature review which examined the co-benefits and trade-offs of net-zero and pro-nature behaviours identified a methodological evidence need around the prioritisation of pro-nature behaviours, primarily due to the complexity faced by any given behaviour resulting in multiple environmental endpoints. A behavioural prioritisation methodology has been developed in response to this evidence need (see section 2.5), some of which will be tested in this research