Knowledge co-production and behavioural change: collaborative approaches for promoting sustainable mobility

Abstract

Behavioural change has become regarded as a key tool for policy makers to promote behavioural change that can reduce carbon emissions from personal travel. Recommended changes in travel behaviours range from travel mode shifts (from car to bicycle and walking), through amending established habits (car sharing rather than sole car occupancy) to more radical alternatives, such as reducing short haul flying and replacing such flights with rail travel. Yet academic research has suggested that promoting low carbon travel behaviours, in particular those associated with leisure and tourism practices, is particularly challenging because of the highly valued and conspicuous nature of the consumption involved. Accordingly, traditional top-down approaches to developing behavioural change campaigns have largely been ineffectual in this field and this chapter explores innovative ways to understand and develop behavioural change campaigns that are driven from the bottom upwards. In doing so, we draw on emergent literature from management studies and social marketing to explore how ideas of service dominant logic can be used to engage consumers in developing each stage of a behavioural change campaign. Using data and insights from research conducted in the south-east of the UK, we outline and evaluate the process for co-producing knowledge about low carbon travel and climate change. By focusing on two key segments of traditionally frequent flyers (young professionals and ‘empty nesters’) we illustrate how behavioural change campaign creation can be an engaging, lively and productive process of knowledge and experience sharing. The chapter ends by considering the role that co-production and co-creation can have in developing strategies for low carbon mobility and, more broadly, the ways in which publics understand and react to anthropogenic climate change.