Current political responses to global challenges like climate change are inadequate. Decision-makers often complain that there is too little public acceptance of the need for radical new interventions to address these problems. They point to the electoral risks that they would run if they were to adopt more ambitious change.
As a result, decision makers often retreat into only advocating those policy interventions where short-term self-interest can be easily seen to coincide with longer-term social or environmental interest (for example, they might highlight the business opportunities offered by a new renewables industry, or the savings to a domestic energy bill through simple energy-efficiency measures like installation of loft insulation).
Our collective responses to global challenges are shaped by dominant social values and aspects of identity (who we see ourselves as being). These values and aspects of identity constrain both what we are prepared to do as individuals, and the changes that we are prepared to allow governments to make in our common interest. Such aspects of identity include the prevalence of materialistic values, our tendency to define ourselves as ‘in-groups’ (and to display prejudice towards ‘out-groups’), or the psychological responses to sources of fear or threats.
If campaigning organisations are to help address this barrier to the emergence of ambitious public demands on global challenges, it will be through a new approach. In addition to focussing on the immediate policy interventions that governments can make (within current political constraints) campaigning organisations must also come to focus on strategic points of intervention in engaging societal values and aspects of identity.
Dominant values and identities are shaped and held within a social context. The environment we create – through the media, marketing, and political debate, for example – all have an influence on the set of values that predominate. It is therefore possible to identify key policy interventions that would have particular influence in bringing other values and identities to the fore. Political lobbying strategies can be deployed not just to deliver specific regulatory change that impacts directly upon a developmental or environmental problem (e.g. emissions regulations), but also to begin to engage the underlying values and identities which constrain more ambitious public and political responses to these challenges.
To engage at the level of societal values and identity is sometimes dismissed as too difficult. However, there are compelling reasons for the necessity of such engagement (for a discussion of these reasons, see the recent WWF report, Weathercocks and Signposts). If such engagement is necessary, then campaigning organisations must begin to work in this way – difficult or otherwise.
But there is also evidence that engaging societal values and identities may be easier than often acknowledged. Identity campaigning is not about changing values, so much as legitimising and supporting the increased prevalence of a set of existing but currently suppressed values and aspects of identity.
Such engagement offers exciting new possibilities for coalitions between a range of progressive organisations (e.g. environment, development, human rights and animal rights). Barriers to delivery on the demands of these organisations, when analysed in terms of the social values and identities which constrain political action, are often found to be shared.
An example: Self-enhancing, materialistic values
Studies repeatedly find that materialistic values are antagonistic to the emergence of humanitarian and pro-environmental behaviour. Materialistic people are less altruistic and less concerned about the welfare of fellow humans and other living things (they are also, on average, less healthy and happy).
Environment and development organisations (amongst others) might therefore find common cause in campaigning on issues that will help to diminish the dominance of materialistic values. Tighter regulation of the marketing industry could be one such campaign focus.
