Research in Environmental Governance and Behaviour

We study the consequences and effectiveness of environmental governance and policies.

Climate change, biodiversity conservation, and conflicts over forest and land use are some of the challenges that societies face today. These problems have in common that their causes can be found in society and that they have profound consequences for society.

Environmental governance is all about dealing with these issues. Traditional command-and-control governance is increasingly supplemented by ‘soft law’. This includes modes of governing that rely on extensive stakeholder involvement to create public commitment and support to policies, and mechanisms that mobilise and motivate citizens to voluntary, environmental action.

Examples of this kind of policy tools are voluntary agreements, education and capacity building, as well as social learning processes.

Research question

We study the consequences and effectiveness of these policies through a number of research questions such as:

• How do people’s perceptions of environmental problems and of their own capacity to act relate to environmental behaviour?

• Why do people not change behaviour even when it pays off?

• What role does the use of soft law play in constructing citizens and identities?

• What is the impact of policy instruments on environmental behaviour?

• What are the consequences of soft law in terms of democracy and participation?

• What role do social networks and norms play in environmental policies and behaviour?

• What role does environmental policy play in the creation and resolution of natural resource conflicts?

• What are the ethical implications of policy decisions?

• How can policy tools be improved by considering what motivates different groups of people?

• How can participation and collaborative learning contribute to sustainability?

Large international collaboration projects

• CIDEA: Citizen Driven Environmental Action, where we investigave how citizens are motivated to change their behaviour and thereby reduce emissions of CO2 to the environment, mainly as regard household energy consumption and transport behaviour.

• CLUVA (EU FP7).

Collaboration

Research is conducted in collaboration with a large range of partners, including Dep. of Political Science and Dep. of Anthropology at University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School,