IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2018 - 26

Efforts to encourage sustainable energy behavior change will be
more effective when they target important drivers of relevant
behaviors and remove significant barriers to behavioral change.

Changing the Context
a key first step in policy design is identifying what constraints
people face and how behavior change can be facilitated. often
designers of a policy or new technology are not aware of
the constraints and concerns of people. so careful evidencebased diagnosis is necessary since intuition about barriers
to behavioral change may not be correct. This suggests that
those designing programs and policies and developing new
technologies should directly engage with interested and
affected parties and understand which factors influence the
relevant behavior. such direct engagement can help build
mutual understanding and trust and lead to more effective
policies. as part of this effort, governments and organizations need to be transparent and accountable when implementing energy policy.
external incentives can be useful to motivate and enable
people to engage in sustainable energy behavior by lowering
the barriers to action. for example, infrastructure changes
such as dedicated bicycle lanes, better public transport infrastructure, or closing off areas to private car traffic may promote sustainable transportation. likewise, the production
and sale of energy-saving products can be regulated (e.g.,
a legally mandated phase out of incandescent lightbulbs or
fleet fuel-efficiency standards).
another common external incentive is pricing policy, including subsidies, rebates, and taxes. The common
understanding is that such pricing policies are rather effective to promote sustainable energy behavior because people
are strongly motivated to save money. Well-designed financial incentive programs can be effective when they help
overcome financial barriers, such as initial costs of investments in energy-efficient technology or retrofits, which is
especially important for programs and policies to have a
positive impact on the less affluent. Yet responses to pricing
policies are often not as great as might be assumed, suggesting care must be used in using prices as a policy instrument.
notably, as indicated earlier, many other motivations affect
behavior besides financial costs and benefits. Moreover,
in many cases, financial incentives to promote sustainable
energy behavior yield small financial gains, partly because
energy is rather cheap, making behavior change seem not
worth the effort.
The effects of financial incentives strongly depend on
nonfinancial factors, such as the ease of participating in a
program or marketing efforts. besides, financial incentives,
an extrinsic motivation can crowd out intrinsic motivation to
26

ieee power & energy magazine

engage in sustainable energy behavior. it may even give the
impression that one can buy the right to pollute; people no
longer feel guilty when acting in environmentally unfriendly
ways as they have paid for doing so. as a result, financial
incentives may even increase the behavior that was intended
to be minimized because people think they have "paid for
it." of course, it is possible to buy "carbon offsets" to compensate for emissions. The concern is that the psychological
effects of monetization might increase emissions even when
no offsets are actually in place.
extrinsic incentives, such as prices and regulations,
are often only effective while they are in place. When the
incentive is removed or the chance of being caught and
sanctioned is seen as low, people may revert to previous
behaviors. in some cases, however, extrinsic incentives can
result in long-term behavior changes, even after the incentive is removed. such effects are particularly likely when
incentives motivate people to try out the behavior, and they
find that the behavior appears to have more beneficial and
fewer negative consequences than anticipated, or when
new habits have been formed. There is some evidence that
incentivizing a behavior for a moderate time period can
lead to more positive evaluations and long-term increases
in the behavior.

Changing Knowledge and Motivations
since many people remain unaware of the links between
their energy behavior and critical sustainability issues, it is
often useful to provide information about the need for and
urgency of a sustainable energy transition and the significance of their actions for sustainability. such information
would enable people to act upon their intrinsic motivation
to protect the environment. information on the environmental impact of different behavior options can often be
provided in simple ways, such as via "green" product labeling. information on costs and benefits of different behaviors will be particularly effective when people start with
inaccurate perceptions of such costs and benefits, when
such information is from a trusted source and offered at
a time and place close to decisions. While information
provision is important, it is seldom sufficient since decisions inevitably are based on more than just knowledge. so
effective approaches to changing behavior have to avoid the
"information deficit" fallacy, assuming that if members of
the public had the same information as professionals, their
behavior would change.
january/february 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2018