Bridging Environmental Values

Much current government policy and initiatives is aimed at encouraging pro-environmental behaviour change (PEBC) amongst organisations and individuals to ameliorate environmental pollution and the drivers of climate change.
Pro-environmental behaviour means behaviour that consciously seeks to minimize the negative impact of one's actions on the natural and built world (e.g. minimize resource and energy consumption, use of non-toxic substances, reduce waste production, etc.).Pro-environmental behaviour can be viewed as a mixture of self-interest (e.g. to pursue a strategy that minimises one's own health risks) and of concern for other people, the next generation, other species, or whole ecosystems (e.g. preventing air pollution that may cause risks for others' health and/or the global climate).

A major premise of such behaviour change programmes has been that providing information that improves knowledge leads to greater sensitivity toward the environment, which in turn will encourage individuals to engage in more responsible ways toward the environment. It may be hoped that pro-environmental behaviour undertaken in one social sphere (home, work, church, sports club) might translate to how people behave in these other settings for example, recycling or energy efficiency in the workplace leads to matching patterns in other settings. However, there is little evidence of how people actually translate and transfer their activities between these different settings. Managing the conflict between work and home domains has become an increasingly pressing issue. Different places varying patterns of what is acceptable practice that will have a strong influence on the perceived options of behaviour for individuals. People have a tendency of wanting to fit in - and behave as their neighbours and peers behave. People may operate to one set of beliefs in the home setting for example, but do not transfer this behaviour to their work place and vice-versa.

In order to make the transitions to a more sustainable society it will be necessary to gain a better understanding of whether, how and why these disconnects in behaviour occur. More importantly there is the challenge of identifying and developing individual or community led solutions to overcome these disconnections. The arts and humanities approaches and methods offers a unique way of identifying and investigating these behaviour choices that has not been utilised extensively before in this field.

This proposal will pilot an approach combining participatory diagramming with co-creation and analysis of art pieces to investigate these choices, barriers and opportunities with approximately 50 community participants. it is hoped that the use of visual methodologies ways for people to express information and feelings that are difficult to capture using other approaches. They are intended to create a more trusting atmosphere that enhances participant sharing. The creative process is also intended to stimulate amongst participants new personal insights. For example, it has been argued that through the process of producing a drawing, the drawer is simultaneously constructing the knowledge represented in the drawing and the actual product of the drawing itself.Participants will be recruited from a cross-section of businesses representing a spectrum of strong to weak environmental policies and corresponding home patterns of behaviour. This will allow us to look at the spectrum of connections and disconnections between home based actions and work place behaviour.

It is hoped that the novel approaches piloted by this scoping study will identify new opportunities and methods for exploring the issues of encouraging and embedding pro-environmental behaviour across society. This topic has continuing policy relevance both in the UK but also internationally. This could make the project findings relevant to a wide range of audience including policy makers, businesses environmental organisations.

Communications and Engagement
This proposal builds on the Connected Communities grant entitled Improved Community Engagement using Spatial and Visualisation methods. This project led by the PI involved knowledge exchange activities that included a multi-disciplinary team of geographers, environmental scientists and community artists. The findings included:

- Novel visualisation approaches can help overcome issues of data overload for participants by bringing complex data together in an intelligible and interesting way. These approaches offer different communities ways of understanding multiple interrelated issues to allow them to be betting included in efforts to solve difficult complicated real-world problems.
- For engagement abstract representations may be more useful to encourage co-learning.
- The use of visualisations can both encourage and enhance the engagement however different engagement tools are needed for different locations or audiences and these needed to be tailored for specific communities to realise these benefits.

This proposed research intends to use these findings and test their applicability in relation to the 'wicked' real world problem of pro-environmental behaviour change.
The development of the project proposal has already led to increased connections between the PI and Co-PI and local community artists and organisation who will be involved in the research if successful. If funded we will build new connections to existing community organisations to recruit participants. This will build an additional bridge between the project team and the general public - embedding the research in the wider community.
The proposed project includes opportunities for the research team across the UK to come together for co-learning and methods development. The team will also re-convene for the analysis phase and this activity will also involve a significant degree of co-learning and skills exchange.
The findings of the research will largely be visual making them suitable and attractive to a wide audience. They will be distributed through a dedicated website based at the University of York. This portal will also contain project videos developed in the workshops and with the local participants (with their permission) - building on the video content embedded in the ICE-SaV website.

Collaboration
The PI has already worked successfully with one Co-PI on the ICE_SaV grant - this will build on this existing connection. The PI and Co-PIs will have overall responsibility for delivering the community engagement and case studies in their differing geographic locations. Depending on the form of artistic support required each case study may require the development of new collaborations with relevant local arts practitioners beyond the initial team. This will broaden the impact of the grant beyond the core group.

Exploitation and Application
The research is seen as useful and relevant to environmental scientists, psychologists, policy makers and practitioners interested in promoting and inducing shift to pro-environmental behaviour. Whilst the cohort of participants is relatively small (being seen as a scoping study) it is hoped that the novel approaches piloted by this project will lead to new insights - or at least identify new opportunities and methods for exploring the issues of encouraging and embedding pro-environmental behaviour across society. This topic has continuing policy relevance both in the UK but also internationally. This could make the project and its findings relevant to a wide range of audiences beyond academia including policy makers, businesses and environmental organisations.