Past Government-Led Behaviour Change Research

**Please note this is an Award Notice not a call for competition** This contract has been awarded via Energy and Climate Change Behavioural Science Framework Agreement. Reference: CR20116.

Background

Our team would like to build the evidence base on successful government programmes to change the general public's behaviour, to understand what components, make government-led behaviour change successful and how this evidence can be applied to the context of net zero behaviour change. We are looking to review the full range of levers used to influence behaviour, i.e., regulatory, fiscal, comms, etc.

We are also looking to develop a clear set of principles for supporting behaviour change for net zero. We currently have conflicting evidence from different sources and need a synthesis that evaluates the conflicting evidence and comes to some clear positions on principles to help guide our approach to supporting behaviour change.

Rationale

The rationale of carrying out this research is to aid the team's work on developing a successful behaviour change and public engagement strategy for net zero. The research would help to inform the direction of these strategies and methods that should be employed to achieve our team's objectives for increasing awareness and engagement with the public on what is required of them to help reach net zero. This is a behavioural insights project because we want to draw on the experience of suppliers in the framework to analyse past government programmes with a behavioural lens and assess which aspects could be applied to a net zero context. This will require a strong degree of behavioural expertise.

Desired Outputs:

A short report. The output will largely be integrated into Chapter 2 of the Behaviour Change Strategy. We will need past examples of where HMG has successfully influenced behaviour change before, why it worked, will it work in the context of climate and energy, what insights can be gained, and to use this to generate a clear set of guiding principles for how we can achieve behaviour change for net zero. We would also like to factor in time for a final findings presentation.