Abstract
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. First, I will take stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics. Then I will look at 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, we will go through potential conceptual limitations and explore fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.
POPCLIMA has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research And Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement no 101002973). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Collegamento Microsoft Teams
Organizzazione
Raya Muttarak