In the 1970s to the 1990s, Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) was the main applied tool to achieve behavioural change. It was recognised that many flipcharts, flyers, brochures, training manuals, and even radio programmes were conducted in the past to address the complex sustainability and development problems facing different communities. Challenges include issues such as climate change, public health, waste management, biodiversity and conservation management, and social inequities. However, increasing knowledge, raising awareness, or other determinants of human behaviour does not necessarily translate into long-term actions. Having certain knowledge is just one of many factors that influence people’s ability and willingness to practice a given behaviour [1]. Social and Behaviour Change emerged as a more strategic approach to cultivate insightful understanding of how individuals, communities, and organisations make decisions, can help development actors to identify the underlying motivations and barriers for behaviour and behaviour change and incorporate these insights into the work in place [2].
Recognising the need for an effective strategy to design comprehensive and people-centred solutions to waste management challenges, the ASEAN Municipal Solid Waste Management Enhancement (AMUSE) project adopts an approach that blends insights from behavioural science and design thinking to develop breakthrough solutions. The initiative aims to design a range of awareness-raising activities on waste management for students and teachers at school establishments in Da Lat province. RARE’s behaviour change framework is chosen as theorical framework to apply for activity designation.
Rare’s Behavioral Principles use six levers of behaviour change that can be pulled individually or in combination to achieve different effects when designing interventions:
- Information: Providing information about what the desired behaviour is, why it matters, and how to do it
- Rules and Regulations: Enacting rules that promote or restrict a behaviour
- Emotional Appeals: Using emotional messages to drive behaviour
- Material Incentives: Increasing or decreasing real or perceived costs, time, or effort for doing a behaviour
- Social Influences: Leveraging the behaviour, beliefs, and expectations of others
- Choice Architecture: Changing the context in which choices are made
Together with the behaviour principle as abovementioned the Rare’s Behavior-Centered Design is applied to design the Green School Initiative in Da Lat province with following steps as below:
- To commence the designation of the Green School Initiative, a range of stakeholder engagement activities with local partners, practitioners on the educational environment are planned to frame an overview on the target behaviour, target actor, and describe their context.
- The next step is to obtain insights into the target actors and their behaviours, with an emphasis on their motivations and challenges they may face.
- After that, information is mapped out to describe the linkages and influencing factors.
- From visual mapping, it is easier to generate, group and prioritise intervention ideas in this step – Ideate.
- The following step is to select optimal intervention ideas and develop a prototype (small-scale version).
- The prototype captures its essential features to test in the following step with the target actor and revise based on the test’s results.
- Launching only happens when the revisions of intervention activities in full-scale are made with its evaluation and impact metrics framework.
- Assessment is an indispensable step to investigate and assess the impact of the intervention and reflect on potential improvements.
It’s believed that to deliver the change that lasts, motivations of individuals, communities and organisations are key factors.
References
[1] Darnton A. (2008) An overview of behaviour change models and their uses
[2] Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment (BE.Center): https://rare.org/program/center-for-behavior-the-environment/#
