University of Groningen
Bringing Community and Environment Together
Sloot, Daniel
DOI:
10.33612/diss.166147736
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Publication date: 2021
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Sloot, D. (2021). Bringing Community and Environment Together: the role of community environmental initiatives in sustainability transitions. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.166147736
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Chapter 6
“There is no greater power than a community
discovering what it cares about.”
Community environmental initiatives may alleviate environmental problems and promote transitions towards a more sustainable society (IPCC, 2018; Middlemiss & Parrish, 2010). Yet, so far, little insight exists into the potential contribution of such initiatives to sustainability transitions. We aimed to address this gap by studying the extent to which community environmental initiatives are effective in promoting sustainable behaviour. Specifically, we examined what motivates people to join community environmental initiatives, and to what extent involvement in such initiatives may actually promote pro-environmental behaviour. We proposed that community factors may play a key role in understanding why people become involved in community environmental initiatives, and why community environmental initiatives could promote pro-environmental behaviour.
We first investigated whether people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives can motivate members to behave pro-environmentally (Chapter 2). We proposed that involvement in community environmental initiatives can provide additional motivation to engage in pro-environmental behaviour beyond individuals’ personal pro-pro-environmental motivations, as initiative membership can become an important part of people’s self-concept (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). As such, an initiative’s pro-environmental goals and motivations can become members’ own goals, motivating them to behave in line with these goals (Haslam, 2004; Turner, 1991). We further proposed that initiative membership may foster cooperative behaviours and mutual influence among members, which we refer to as ‘communal intentions’ (Haslam, 2004).
We then examined what motivates involvement in community environmental initiatives in the first place (Chapters 3-5). We hypothesised that over and above individuals’ personal pro-environmental motivations, community factors would play a role in initiative involvement. First, we proposed that an individual is more likely to become involved in a community environmental initiative when they perceive their community as motivated to engage in pro-environmental behaviour (Turner, 1991). Second, we proposed that the extent to which an individual is involved in their community affects
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al discussion
the likelihood that they will become involved in a community environmental initiative. Notably, we expected that the more an individual is involved in their community, the more they take the community’s motivations (such as how important community members believe engaging in sustainable behaviour is) into account in their own actions (Bicchieri, 1990; cf. Fritsche et al., 2018). Moreover, we expected stronger community involvement to be linked to a person’s willingness to engage in any communal behaviours, such as engaging in an environmental initiative run by members from their community, independent of their environmental motivations (see also Seyranian, Sinatra, & Polikoff, 2015). We tested these predictions in Chapter 3.
Next, people may become involved in community environmental initiatives because they want to be involved in their community and meet and connect with others in the community. We proposed that such a communal motive can be a unique motivator to become involved in community environmental initiatives, next to other potentially relevant motives, such as environmental and financial motives (Chapter 4). We further hypothesised that appealing to these motives can promote initiative involvement (Chapter 5).
6.1 Summary of Findings and Theoretical Implications
Below, we discuss the main findings and theoretical implications for each chapter. After that, we discuss the overall theoretical and practical implications of this dissertation as well as limitations and future research directions following from our findings.
Can Initiative Involvement Motivate Pro-Environmental Behaviour?
Chapter 2 addressed the first main question of whether people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives, including initiative membership and identification with the initiative among members, can uniquely motivate pro-environmental behaviour in line with the initiative goals and motivations, over and above one’s personal pro-environmental motivations. We studied the
effects of initiative involvement on household sustainable energy intentions and behaviours (e.g., using more sustainable energy sources, replacing household appliances with more efficient ones, etc.) as well as communal sustainable energy intentions (e.g., motivating others in the community to save energy). We hypothesised that people’s initiative involvement, specifically initiative membership and initiative identification (i.e., members’ psychological involvement in their initiative), would be uniquely related to household and communal sustainable energy intentions and behaviours even when personal pro-environmental motivations are controlled for. Specifically, we reasoned that in individual’s initiative membership can become an important part of their self-concept, motivating them to behave in line with the group goals (Turner, 1991). Furthermore, we explored if initiative involvement would be related to broader pro-environmental behaviours not explicitly targeted by the initiative, such as donating money to environmental organisations. As shared group memberships may foster engagement in any community activities (cf. Haslam, 2004), we additionally explored if initiative involvement was uniquely related to broader communal behaviours (unrelated to energy), such as setting up other initiatives in one’s community. We tested our predictions in a questionnaire study among members and non-members of 29 community energy initiatives in the Netherlands.
Results indicated that personal pro-environmental motivations (in particular, the personal importance of engaging in sustainable energy behaviour) increased the likelihood that an individual was involved in a community energy initiative and engaged in sustainable energy behaviours as well as other pro-environmental behaviours, highlighting the importance of taking these motivations into account to examine the unique relationship between initiative involvement and sustainable energy behaviour. This finding indicates that those involved in a community energy initiative may already act more pro-environmentally because of their personal pro-environmental motivations. Importantly, in line with our expectations, we generally found that over and above one’s personal motivation, involvement in the initiative was positively related to sustainable energy intentions and behaviours, but not
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to broader pro-environmental behaviours (except for buying environmentally-friendly products). Specifically, compared to non-members, initiative members reported engaging in more sustainable household energy behaviours and having stronger intentions to engage in communal sustainable energy behaviours. Yet, compared to non-members, the initiative members had no stronger intentions to engage in household sustainable energy behaviours. Furthermore, among initiative members, stronger identification with the initiative increased the likelihood that members reported engaging in some (but not all) of the sustainable energy behaviours and having stronger household and communal sustainable energy intentions. Stronger initiative involvement (both membership and identification) was also associated with stronger intentions to engage in other communal activities, such as setting up other initiatives in the community unrelated to energy. Thus, with some exceptions, both indicators of initiative involvement (i.e., initiative membership and initiative identification) were uniquely related to sustainable energy behaviours and to communal intentions. Results further indicated that initiative identification generally did not have to be very strong for members to engage in more sustainable energy behaviour than non-members. These insights suggest that over and above one’s personal pro-environmental motivations, involvement in community environmental initiatives may motivate pro-environmental behaviour that is in line with initiatives’ goals, and possibly also communal behaviour more broadly. These findings have important theoretical implications. Our findings corroborate research on the relevance of personal pro-environmental motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in the novel context of community energy initiatives (Steg et al., 2015). More importantly, our results point to the unique role of group involvement in understanding pro-environmental behaviours and intentions (cf. Fritsche et al., 2018; Jans et al., 2018). Notably, our results show that community environmental initiatives can function as important groups that promote pro-environmental behaviours among people involved in the initiatives, in addition to their personal motivation to engage in this behaviour. This indicates that group involvement can provide an additional motivation to act pro-environmentally.
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Extending previous studies, we not only considered individual intentions and behaviour in the household but also communal intentions. The latter seems particularly relevant given the group context in which community energy initiatives exist. In line with this, involvement (membership as well as the level of identification) in a community energy initiative seems to positively relate to communal energy intentions and communal intentions unrelated to energy use. Hence, involvement in community environmental initiatives seems to motivate both environmental and communal intentions, implying that community environmental initiatives may offer important co-benefits, such as fostering community activities in general. Future research could examine why and to what extent initiative involvement could bring about such co-benefits of fostering communal behaviours and possibly a sense of community more broadly. Specifically, future research could examine the role of initiative activities in affecting people’s communal behaviour, such as connecting with other community members through initiative meetings. Furthermore, future research is needed to better understand the potential initiative involvement has in fostering a sense of community in the community at large (e.g., fostering community activities outside the initiative), rather than only among members. Moreover, as our results are based on correlational evidence, another important avenue for future research is to examine the causal effects of initiative involvement on pro-environmental and communal outcomes via experimental methods.
What Motivates Involvement in Community Environmental Initiatives?
In Chapters 3-5 of this dissertation, we addressed our second research question: which factors motivate people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives? Specifically, Chapter 3 tested the hypothesis that a person would be more likely to become involved in a community energy initiative when they perceived their community as more motivated to engage in sustainable energy behaviour, over and above their personal motivation
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to do so. We further hypothesised that this perception of the community sustainable energy motivation would be more strongly related to initiative involvement when an individual is more strongly involved in their community, as reflected in their level of identification with the initiative and the extent of interpersonal contact with community members. Furthermore, we expected that both indicators of community involvement would be directly related to initiative involvement independent of any community sustainable energy motivations as well, because people who are more strongly involved in their local community may be more likely to engage in any kind of community activity, including involvement in community energy initiatives. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a questionnaire study among members of seven communities in which a community energy initiative had recently been set up. We examined the extent to which the community factors introduced above and one’s personal pro-environmental motivations were related to two indicators of initiative involvement: people’s willingness to actively participate in community energy initiatives (e.g., in terms of financially investing or volunteering one’s time) and attendance of an initial initiative meeting. We first examined the role of each indicator of community involvement separately before considering them jointly.
Our results indicated that people are more willing to join community energy initiatives, but not more likely to attend an initiative meeting, when they are personally motivated for sustainable energy. Although people were also more willing to join the initiatives and attend the first initiative meeting when they perceived people in their community as motivated for sustainable energy behaviour, this relationship was no longer significant when we additionally considered their level of identification with the community and the degree of interpersonal contact with other community members.
Furthermore, and contrary to our prediction, the effect of community sustainable energy motivation on initiative involvement was not stronger the more a person was involved in their community, both in terms of level of community identification and interpersonal contact. If anything, results suggested the opposite pattern, with community motivation being a stronger
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predictor of willingness to participate among those less involved in their community. Yet, as expected, we did generally find that people who are more strongly involved in their community (as reflected in stronger level of identification with their community and more interpersonal contact with others in the community) were more willing to become involved in the community energy initiative and were more likely to have attended the first initiative meeting. However, when considered simultaneously, the indicators of community involvement could not uniquely explain initiative meeting attendance. It is possible that attending an initiative meeting is less well-explained because, unlike willingness to participate, it faces additional practical barriers, such as people might simply not have been able to attend the one-time fixed meeting.
These findings have important theoretical implications. Speaking to our findings from Chapter 2, people’s personal pro-environmental motivations do not only relate to sustainable energy behaviour in community energy initiatives (Steg et al., 2015) but also to willingness to participate in an initiative in the first place (although they are not predictive of initiative meeting attendance). Additionally, community sustainable energy motivation is related to initiative involvement over and above these personal pro-environmental motivations, which is in line with previous research showing that people’s perception that their community is motivated for the environment can promote individuals’ own pro-environmental behaviour (cf. Fritsche et al., 2018; Jachimowicz et al., 2018). However, we found that community sustainable energy motivation is no longer significantly related to the indicators of initiative involvement when both indicators of community involvement (community identification and interpersonal contact with community members) are considered simultaneously. Interestingly, this suggests that community involvement is more important for explaining willingness to actively participate and attendance of an initiative meeting than the community sustainable energy motivation, and thus the goals the community strives for. These findings do not seem to correspond with our reasoning that pro-environmental group goals particularly predict pro-environmental behaviour (in this case initiative
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involvement) if individuals are strongly involved in the group (such as a community or community initiative; see also Fielding & Hornsey, 2016; Turner, 1991). One explanation could be that an indiviudal who more strongly identifies with their community has already internalized the community sustainable energy motivation (exploratory analyses showed that personal and community sustainable energy motivation were indeed more similar among people who more strongly identified), leaving little room for community sustainable energy motivation to still have a unique effect on initiative involvement next to the personal pro-environmental motivation we also measure. Those less strongly identified with their community would internalize the group goals to a lesser extent, and as such community sustainable energy motivation can have unique predictive power. Yet, the bivariate correlations between the different community factors were generally relatively strong, making it more difficult to detect unique effects of the community factors on the indicators of initiative involvement.
Another explanation may be that the dependent variables studied in Chapter 3 reflect a communal behaviour in addition to a pro-environmental behaviour, as being involved allows people in the community to meet and connect with each other. It might be that pro-environmental group goals play a more important role for more individual pro-environmental behaviours, but for behaviours with more communal aspects (such as initiative involvement), community involvement becomes a similarly, and sometimes more, important driver. This is consistent with our reasoning that the more a person is involved in their community, the more motivated they are to engage in any communal behaviours within this community (cf. Haslam, 2004). From this perspective, our findings in Chapter 3 are somewhat similar to those from Chapter 2, in which we also find that the effects of personal pro-environmental motivations matter relatively less compared to the effects of initiative involvement when communal intentions (rather than individual pro-environmental behaviour in the household) are considered as the dependent variable.
An important novelty of Chapter 3 is that we considered the effects of two indicators of community involvement – community identification and
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interpersonal contact with community members. The finding that both are generally uniquely related to initiative involvement shows that we can gain a better understanding of the influence that groups (such as communities or community initiatives) can have on individual behaviours and initiative involvement if we consider both factors together. Initiative involvement can be explained both by people’s feelings of being psychologically involved in their community and by the interpersonal contact they actually engage in with fellow community members. Future research is needed to test whether this finding can be replicated and to further examine the processes through which community identification and interpersonal contact may affect initiative involvement. Moreover, future research could further disentangle which of these two types of community involvement is most relevant at what point in time and for which aspect of initiative involvement.
In summary, the findings from Chapter 3 suggest that different motivational paths may underlie initiative involvement. On the one hand, pro-environmental motivations can explain why people become involved in community environmental initiatives, as shown in both Chapters 2 and 3. On the other hand, the extent to which people identify with their community and engage in interpersonal contact with other community members provides alternative paths to explaining initiative involvement. As these paths do not necessarily reflect environmental motivations but do reflect the communal aspects of initiative involvement, we refer to them as a communal path and suggest that individuals may be motivated to become involved in community environmental initiatives for environmental reasons and/or for communal reasons. More generally, both Chapters 2 and 3 underline the importance of group involvement. In particular, both reflect that an individual’s identification with their group is positively related to pro-environmental behaviour (Chapter 2) and initiative involvement in the first place (Chapter 3). Indeed, stronger identification with a community energy initiative was uniquely related to sustainable energy behaviour in Chapter 2, while identification with the community explained initiative involvement.
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Chapter 4 examined whether a communal motive (i.e.., being involved in one’s community and meeting and connecting with other community members) could be a unique motivator underlying a person’s involvement in a community environmental initiative, next to financial and environmental motives. We hypothesised that both environmental motives (i.e., protecting the environment) and communal motives are uniquely related to people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives, while we expected financial motives would be less strongly related to initiative involvement. We examined the relationships between these three types of motives and three indicators of initiative involvement: interest to join the initiative, initiative membership, and initiative identification among members. Across a total of 39 community energy initiatives, we conducted three questionnaire studies at different stages of people’s decision-making process to become a member of and be involved in the initiatives. Moreover, we examined people’s direct ratings of how important the three motives were for being involved and how these ratings were related to indicators of initiative involvement, as studies have shown that there may be a discrepancy between the former and the latter and financial motives in particular might be overrated (Noppers et al., 2014). Across all three studies, results indicated that people rated communal motives as substantially less important for being involved in the initiative than financial and environmental motives when asked directly. In contrast, results revealed that, as expected, both communal and environmental motives were generally uniquely related to different indicators of initiative involvement, whereas financial motives were not. Specifically, stronger communal motives increased the likelihood of being an initiative member and were related to a stronger interest to join the initiative in some but not all studies and were particularly related to a stronger initiative identification among members. Moreover, environmental motives were generally positively related to initiative membership and interest to join but less so to initiative identification (being either more weakly related or non-significant across studies). Hence, people may be more likely to become involved in a community environmental initiative if they are motivated to meet and connect with other
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community members and if they are motivated for the environment, while financial motives do not uniquely predict involvement. Interestingly, whether and how strongly environmental and communal motives were related to initiative involvement varied for different indicators of initiative involvement. Specifically, communal motives seem to play a more important role for members’ identification with the initiative compared to explaining interest to join or initiative membership, while environmental motives seem to play a slightly more important role for interest to join or membership compared to initiative identification. Communal motives may be especially relevant for the continuous involvement in an initiative. Future studies could further unravel the differential importance of environmental and communal motives for different indicators of initiative involvement.
Our findings are in line with previous studies that have shown that people may overestimate the importance of financial motives as drivers of environmental behaviour (Noppers et al., 2014; see also Schwartz et al., 2015). Instead, corroborating our insights from the previous two chapters, the results of Chapter 4 point to the importance of environmental motives in understanding involvement in community environmental initiatives. As such, our findings complement a growing body of literature suggesting that environmental motives are a consistent predictor of different types of environmental behaviour (see Dietz, 2015b; Steg, 2016, for overview papers). Most importantly, we found that having stronger communal motives increases the likelihood of being involved in an initiative, although people seem not to acknowledge that this motive may drive their involvement. Communal motives have received little consideration thus far, and no quantitative research has examined their importance for explaining why people become involved in community environmental initiatives. Our findings extend insights from Chapter 3 by showing that people do not only become involved in community energy initiatives because they are involved in their community (i.e., identify with their community or interact with community members) but also because they want to be involved in their community, and to meet and connect with others. Communal motives appear
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to be an important additional motive that can promote people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives, even when people are not strongly motivated to protect the environment.
Chapter 5 aimed to examine whether financial, environmental, and communal appeals to the aforementioned motives could be effective in promoting involvement in community environmental initiatives. As Chapter 4 showed that particularly environmental and communal motives predict initiative involvement, we hypothesised that appeals to environmental and communal motives would be more effective in increasing initiative involvement compared to financial or no appeals. Moreover, we tested the effectiveness of combined environmental and communal appeals. Across four studies, we used a multi-method approach that included controlled experiments as well as a correlational study. In particular, we tested the effects of appeals emphasising financial, environmental, and communal benefits of being involved in three experimental studies as well as a real-life context. We examined two indicators of initiative involvement: interest to join the initiative and actual initiative membership. Additionally, we explored the effects of the three appeals on different process variables that could explain why appeals may promote initiative involvement, namely, the perceived persuasiveness of the message, perceived importance of the emphasised reasons for joining, and beliefs about the benefits of joining the initiative. Across four studies, we found no support for the hypothesis that environmental or communal appeals promote initiative involvement. Specifically, environmental or communal appeals were not more effective in promoting initiative involvement than financial appeals (Study 1) or a control condition (Study 3) were. Furthermore, combined environmental and communal appeals were not more effective than single appeals (Study 2). Moreover, the extent to which financial, environmental, or communal benefits were emphasised in a flyer was not related to the actual number of initiative members in real-life community energy initiatives (Study 4). Interestingly, the appeals mostly also did not affect any of the process variables. This indicates that appeals were not even effective in changing perceptions about,
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and the perceived importance of, the emphasised benefits. We also found no differences in the perceived persuasiveness of environmental, communal, and financial appeals, which may explain why these appeals did not promote involvement. Thus, while we found that environmental and communal motives are related to initiative involvement in Chapter 4, simple appeals to financial, environmental, or communal motives seem not to be effective in promoting involvement in community environmental initiatives.
Our finding that promoting initiative involvement through appeals to different motives (i.e., financial, environmental, or communal motives) is not effective could have different reasons. For one, pre-existing motivations may not be very malleable because people already have ideas about potential benefits of being involved and emphasising these benefits in an appeal may have no added effect. Indeed, research indicates that information strategies, such as appeals, are generally not very effective in promoting sustainable energy behaviour (Abrahamse et al., 2005; Steg et al., 2015). It could be that appeals are more effective among people who strongly value the benefits emphasised by the appeal. Some research has supported this notion by showing that appeals may be more effective when aimed at values people already strongly hold (Bolderdijk, Gorsira, et al., 2013; Van den Broek et al., 2017). Future research could test whether appeals would be more effective when aligned with the values people hold. That is, environmental appeals could be effective among people with strong environmental values while communal appeals could be effective among people with strong communal values.
Moreover, other intervention approaches may be more effective. In particular, both Chapters 3 and 4 show the importance of people’s community involvement for their initiative involvement. Since people are more likely to be involved in community environmental initiatives when they are or want to be involved in their community, promoting actual interpersonal contact between community members could be a more effective approach to motivate initiative involvement than the use of appeals, particularly if such contact is focused on discussing and promoting initiative activities.
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For example, initiative members (particularly those starting the initiative) visiting fellow community members and talking with them about becoming involved in their initiative may be more successful in promoting initiative involvement (cf. Abrahamse & Steg, 2013). Future research could investigate if such strategies are more effective in promoting people’s involvement in community environmental initiatives through more personal means of communication, rather than relying on appeals.
6.2 Limitations and Future Directions
In this dissertation, we used different methodological approaches to investigate our research questions, comprising both experimental and field studies. Each method brings about drawbacks that may limit our findings. Whereas experimental designs generally have lower ecological validity, correlational field studies can mostly not establish causal relations between studied variables. Yet, investigating initiative involvement in real-life communities with existing or starting initiatives means we were able to assess the motivations and behaviours of individuals who actually were or had been faced with the choice of becoming involved in a community environmental initiative, which enhances the ecological validity of our findings. We based our assumptions about the direction and causality of our hypothesised relationships on theory and prior experimental research. Despite this, causality can of course not be inferred from our correlational study designs. Future research could employ longitudinal panel designs and field experiments to balance ecological validity and causal inference. Via cross-lagged analysis that accounts for motivations and behaviours at different points in time, such research designs may provide further insights into the extent to which personal motivations indeed precede initiative involvement, or whether these personal motivations might be influenced by initiative involvement over time. For example, it might be that individuals initially become involved in community environmental initiatives due to their personal pro-environmental or communal motivations, but their
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involvement may subsequently change these motivations, thus increasing pro-environmental and communal motivations.
Although our studies incorporate data from a large number of community energy initiatives, we only focused on a limited range (two particular networks) of solely Dutch initiatives in the domain of sustainable energy. Future research could aim to replicate our findings in the context of other types of community initiatives and in different countries and cultures. Specifically, the question remains if our findings can be generalised to other types of community initiatives beyond the environmental domain, such as community initiatives aimed at promoting economic development, elderly care support, childcare, health, or local infrastructure projects, such as providing bus services in rural areas (Seyfang & Longhurst, 2013; Squazzoni, 2009).
With this dissertation, we have made a first attempt to investigate the role community environmental initiatives play in promoting transitions toward a more sustainable society. Our findings suggest that community factors play a role in the success of such initiatives. Yet, the question remains why community involvement and communal motives are important for initiative involvement. For example, one unanswered question is, what basic values underlie communal motives? This could inform why community factors predict initiative involvement. A large body of literature suggests that people engage in pro-environmental behaviour because of self-enhancing (e.g., financial) or self-transcending (e.g., environmental) values (Dietz, 2015b; Steg, 2016). Yet, the question remains if communal motives derive from self-interest, such as egoistic (the personal gains from being involved in one’s community) or hedonic (the pleasure derived from one’s involvement in community activities) values, or from an interest beyond oneself, such as altruistic values (helping others in the community or advancing genuine community interests; cf. Dietz & Whitley, 2018). Thus, examining the value basis for communal motives is an important avenue for future research.
Moreover, it remains an open question what effects a community environmental initiative may have on community members not involved in the initiative. On the one hand, research has suggested that community
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environmental initiatives can affect the (pro-environmental) behaviour of people and groups that are not involved in the community initiative itself (Seyfang, Hielscher, Hargreaves, Martiskainen, & Smith, 2014). On the other hand, community environmental initiatives might bear the risk of creating subgroups within the wider community by distancing themselves from uninvolved community members. This might inhibit environmental behaviour among those not involved in the initiative, who might come to see themselves as less pro-environmental and act accordingly (cf. Rabinovich, Morton, Postmes, & Verplanken, 2012). Moreover, it might lead to negative feelings towards those who are involved and vice versa (Kurz, Prosser, Rabinovich, & O’Neill, 2020; Tajfel, 1978). Future research could investigate if, and under what circumstances, a community initiative might stimulate pro-environmental behaviour in the wider community and when it might cause division and possibly alienate non-initiative members from the sustainable goals the initiative is pursuing.
6.3 Overall Implications
Taken together, the findings from this dissertation extend research on the motivations underlying pro-environmental behaviours (e.g., Steg, Bolderdijk, et al., 2014; Stern, 2000) to the context of community environmental initiatives. Notably, we show that initiative involvement can motivate pro-environmental behaviour independent of people’s personal pro-environmental motivations. Similarly, being, or wanting to be, involved in one’s community is related to initiative involvement independent of individuals’ environmental motivations, indicating a potential new route for promoting pro-environmental behaviour. Our findings extend theories suggesting that people are more likely to act pro-environmentally when they personally care about the environment (Steg et al., 2015; Stern et al., 1999), as well as social identity theories that propose environmental behaviour is more likely in the presence of strong pro-environmental group norms (e.g., Fritsche et al., 2018). Specifically, we find that it is particularly an individual’s level of involvement in their community
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that seems to explain initiative involvement rather than perceived community goals or norms to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. Moreover, as discussed above, our finding that stronger community involvement (e.g., community identification) does not enhance the effect of community goals on initiative involvement is not in line with social identity reasoning (cf. Haslam, 2004). Future research is needed to examine if the reasoning that stronger group identification generally enhances the effects of group norms on (pro-environmental) behaviour (e.g., Fritsche et al., 2018) only applies to some types of behaviour, whereas a particular (pro-environmental) group norm might not always be necessary or effective to motivate certain other types of behaviours. We reason that initiative involvement brings about the co-benefit of being involved in the communities and meeting and connecting with fellow community members. This implies community environmental initiatives have the potential to encourage pro-environmental behaviour among people less motivated for the environment but motivated for their communities. Moreover, community environmental initiatives have the potential to result in beneficial communal outcomes, such as the establishing of additional community initiatives unrelated to environmental causes. By integrating these two central benefits (i.e., encouraging pro-environmental behaviour and facilitating beneficial communal outcomes), community environmental initiatives seem to possess a unique potential for facilitating the sustainable energy transition in a socially sustainable way.
6.4 Practical Implications
The insights from this dissertation suggest policy makers could support the creation and growth of community environmental initiatives by providing relevant communities with the conditions necessary to achieve this, such as meeting locations, or information and support for those interested in starting an initiative. This might be particularly crucial in communities that lack the capacity to initiate change from the bottom up on their own. Furthermore, evidence suggests that community environmental initiatives
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frequently struggle to survive over longer periods of time or successfully motivate lasting change toward their goals (Hargreaves, Hielscher, Seyfang, & Smith, 2013). Intermediary organisations (such as Buurkracht, which we studied in this dissertation) that provide support in the form of advice, experience, facilitation, and other resources to particular communities may therefore be particularly valuable for the successful growth of initiatives as well as the later upscaling of initiatives’ goals (e.g., Hargreaves et al., 2013).
Practitioners and initiative takers have tended to rely heavily on the assumption that people become involved in community environmental initiatives mainly for financial reasons (see also Chapter 4). For example, flyers used by real community energy initiatives (like those we examined in Chapter 5) to promote involvement predominantly emphasise the financial benefits of being involved. Yet, our findings suggest that financial motives do not uniquely explain involvement in community environmental initiatives and appeals via flyer messages do not effectively promote initiative involvement (Chapter 5), suggesting practitioners should not rely on the effectiveness of communicating the financial benefits of becoming involved in a community environmental initiative. In contrast to financial motives, communal and environmental motives are positively related to involvement (Chapter 4), suggesting that focusing on the communal and environmental benefits of being involved could be a more promising approach. Yet, the question remains as to how this can effectively be done, given that appealing to these benefits through flyers does not promote initiative involvement (Chapter 5).
While people seem to systematically underestimate the importance of community factors for being involved in community environmental initiatives, our findings suggest that community factors may explain involvement (Chapter 4), and pro-environmental behaviours (Chapter 2). In particular, Chapter 3 identifies that two aspects of community involvement, namely community identification and interpersonal contact with community members, may be important for motivating initiative involvement, suggesting that initiative takers could harness the power of people’s existing community involvement to get them involved in new initiatives. This finding is in line with
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a meta-analysis on the effect of social influence strategies to encourage pro-environmental behaviour, which showed that strategies that use people from one’s own social network (e.g., fellow community members) are relatively effective in promoting pro-environmental behaviour (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013). This implies that community events that directly facilitate interpersonal contact between community members while promoting the initiative, such as community festivals or door-to-door chats about the environmental initiative, may help to get community members involved in the initiative. Future research is needed to test if community approaches that build on existing community involvement are more effective than merely communicating via flyer appeals, which seems to be largely ineffective in promoting initiative involvement.
6.5 Conclusion
In summary, this dissertation suggests that community factors may be uniquely positively related to different aspects of involvement in community environmental initiatives and pro-environmental behaviour in line with the initiative goals among those involved. Being involved in community environmental initiatives provides an additional motivation to engage in pro-environmental behaviour next to the extent to which people are personally motivated to do so. Moreover, community factors, such as being involved in one’s community and being motivated to meet and connect with fellow community members, play a distinct role in motivating involvement in community environmental initiatives, over and above people’s personal pro-environmental motivations. This implies that community pro-environmental initiatives can bring about important co-benefits and provide the opportunity to motivate those less motivated for environmental reasons to be involved in community environmental initiatives and to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. By bringing community members together and thus facilitating sustainable communities in the broader sense, community environmental initiatives may thereby not only alleviate environmental problems but also support wider transitions toward a more sustainable society.
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