Social marketing, environmental design and techniques to 'nudge' citizens into doing the right thing have been in the news recently, but there's nothing new about government attempts to change behaviour. Whether it is using fiscal policy to create or constrain consumption, or sentencing policy to deter crime, it is part of government's raison d'etre to influence what citizens do.

So if this has been part of the work of governments ever since governments were invented, what is all the fuss about? In a series of contributions about 'Challenging Behaviour' our contributors explore the heightened interest in government's role in behaviour change through three distinct, but interrelated, factors in modern government.

Sustainability

The first is a realisation that our current lifestyles are unsustainable. We borrow too much, we eat and drink too much, we use too much carbon and our society, if not broken, is more strained and less mobile than it was. These factors pose significant and daunting challenges to us as citizens and as senior local government leaders and suggest that economically, environmentally and socially our current behaviour cannot continue and needs to be challenged.

Budget cuts

The second factor is more recent and more urgent. As Michael Portillo points out in his sobering piece for this pamphlet, local communities and local government face a different and far less bountiful future. The impact of the credit crunch and consequent increase in public spending in the recent months – which has seen public debt doubling from 40–80% of GDP – will change for decades the shape and size of public services in the UK. The relationship between local authorities and their local communities is bound to change. The only question is whether it changes for the better, or for the worse.

Local authorities will no longer be able to afford to provide services at the same level as before and may need to introduce new criteria to help prioritise resources. One direction which policy could take is what Mathew Taylor in his piece in this pamphlet calls 'conditionality'. It takes the debate about rights and responsibilities a stage further – suggesting that services might in the future have conditions attached.

Citizens might be obliged to behave in certain ways in order to qualify for public services. For example, the costs of road accidents to the state could be reduced if all road users had to insure themselves against accidents. Should people who play contact sports have to insure themselves against harm? How far would we go? What about DIY accidents – we all know we should take care using a ladder, drilling etc., should we have to bear part of the cost of carelessness? What about skin cancer, if irresponsible sunbed use was to blame? At present, only citizens who do not act within the law can be stripped of certain rights.

A condition attached to the entitlement for services to act as a good and healthy citizen would represent a significant break with post-war welfare settlement. The moral and ethical issues thrown up are considerable. Where would we draw the line on who is deserving and who is not? Whose version of a responsibility and desert would we codify? But the fundamental question – whether or not government should or could deny services to citizens who behave in ways that are costly to wider society – is being increasingly asked.

A different direction for policy recognises that government is unlikely to achieve behaviour change simply through state power. The tools government has at its disposal are relatively blunt. Incentives and rewards may not outweigh other motivations. Legal coercion has an important role to play (the smoking ban has proved very successful in reducing cigarette consumption) but regulation has to be enforced, and for this to happen public consent is required and can take time to build.

Some professions assume that the public make rational choices based on evidence, while others recognize that users are often troubled, or emotional. Trading Standards uses regulation and enforcement, while planners try to 'design in' behaviour change (for example building flats without car-parking spaces) while children's services emphasise support and advice. It is striking, however, that our different professional groups seldom talk to each other about the assumptions they make, or learn across services about what works.

In new policy areas, such as reducing carbon footprint, recycling, community cohesion, healthy living etc, no social consensus has yet been built about the 'right' way for governments to respond. In many areas of social policy, government has limited power to change the lay of the land. Approaches that rely on enforcement don't work when people need to actively commit to change, rather than to simply comply. While the Department of Health seeks to regulate the many thousands of different organisations that make up the health economy, service outcomes are far more dependent on a range of individual and communal factors.

The influence of friends, family and neighbourhood; where people live, what their occupation is, how much they earn, what they consume and how much they exercise will matter more than anything emanating from Whitehall. Governments have not yet found ways to compel people to exercise or to eat healthily – and we rely on the goodwill and co-operation of citizens if we are to recycle effectively, to reduce energy use, or to create tolerant neighbourhoods. Where we need citizens to invest their own time and energy we must find ways to persuade our fellow citizens to join in a process of behaviour change.

Co-production

Co-production is therefore, as Mathew Taylor points out, the third strand of new thinking. It marks the emergence, he suggests, of the public as 'subject, rather than simply the object of public services'. We have more chance of changing the world when citizens work together to develop responses to challenging behaviour. The best solutions will always be developed from a mutual understanding about what is needed, and what is possible. Co-produced solutions can commit the energy and resources not simply of the local authority and its partners but of local people. But for co-production to work, public agencies have to be willing to share decision-making and control.

Leo Boland takes this argument one stage further. In his piece for this pamphlet, he identifies a conspiracy between public and politicians aided by the media to create a state 'solution' for every problem that individuals and families experience in life' – whenever tragedy strikes an 'initiative is announced and funded, based on whatever evidence there is to hand' Since this will be unsustainable in the future, Boland uses the work of Habermas to draw a distinction between the 'system' – the world of government and bureaucracy and the 'lifeworld': family, friendships and networks – a world of informality, caring, mutuality.

If the system reaches too far into our personal lives, bringing with it bureaucratic systems, rule-governed decisions, control and uniformity, it can have drastic consequences ranging from petty irritations to more menacing intrusion. The way that families and communities solve problems is based on personal feelings of duty and empathy, and on active relationships reached by a process of serious conversation which Habermas calls 'communicative action'. On the other hand, the lifeworld is not always necessarily benign: sometimes councils intervene to protect people from abuse within their own family.

But a change to the balance of intervention may be well overdue – communication free from coercion, and solutions found within the sphere of communicative action may be more sustainable in the long term than state intervention. Instead of the long, tedious and intrusive process of the Criminal Records Bureau, for example, perhaps we might all have learnt to be more vigilant, and asked better questions of our colleagues and neighbours.

Since a concern with behaviour is in the zeitgeist, local government leaders, are beginning to ask a number of important questions. Where does our mandate to change behaviour come from? Who decides what is desirable behaviour and what is not? What is the concept of social good that we draw on to make these decisions? What is the right balance between the carrot and stick? What can we learn from experiments that can be replicated? What are the implications for our organisations, our staff, and our politicians?

We are learning more about behaviour

Policy-makers have traditionally assumed that we are rational beings that will respond logically to incentives or disincentives, and that we fail to make optimal choices because of lack of information. But insights from social psychology and behavioural economics show us that the picture is far more complicated. Insights drawn from psychology show the importance of understanding irrational responses, mental shortcuts, conditioned behaviours, and our unconscious response to reminders about social norms.

The enormous success of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge is because we all recognise our wish to feel part of a wider group. Insights drawn from sociology show the importance of social relationships and human interaction, the powerful impact of a sense of reciprocity and the importance of social values such as consistency. Changes in the physical environment can also influence our behaviour.

In fact, almost the whole of social science is relevant – since behaviour change is a function of both interests and of identity. Economics and sociology help us to understand human interests; both financial – ranging from survival to accumulating wealth – and interests expressed through power and status.

Philosophy and social psychology explore other motivations; including both the conscious human cognitive processes of expressing values and principles, and the emotions and feelings evoked by individual identity and the sense of belonging to a wider group. All this makes a single over-arching 'theory of behaviour change' an unlikely prospect. Useful insights can come from many sources, and theories conflict. If we see human behaviour as an 'open system' we can draw creative insights from many sources.

Mathew Taylor suggests drawing on cultural theory to understand the different ways of thinking about choosing and pursuing change: egalitarian, hierarchical, individualist and fatalist. These paradigms co-exist but cannot be synthesised – 'they are always in tension – like repelling magnets'. 'The best context for the emergence of sustainable solutions is to allow each approach to be in play, tapping into the energy that each has to offer, and managing the capacity of each to disrupt the solutions of the others'.

Thus neat solutions derived from a single model or theory are likely always to be wrong – since they don't allow for the disruptive power of competing paradigms. Far better to evolve clumsy solutions which balance competing drivers for change.

A range of approaches to behaviour change
Most approaches to behaviour change include some or all of the following:

* Education and information giving: giving people the information they need to make informed choices about the effects of their behaviour.
Social marketing: learning from the world of marketing and from the social sciences is used to communicate simple social messages using advertising know-how – paying attention to the costs and benefits of the changes people are being asked to make.
* Appealing to social norms and values: exhortation and persuasion are based on consciously appealing to people's values and norms.
Choice architecture: works with the grain of habits, emotions and cognitive biases to design options most likely to elicit positive behaviours.
* Empowerment and peer-led change: assumes that people will be more likely to change if they feel 'in control' and have access to the support they need.
* Dialogue and exploratory conversation: draws on learning from cognitive therapies and techniques, recognising that people have 'learnt' patterns of behaviour and can 'unlearn' them, by reflecting on the triggers and consequences.
* Rewards and incentives: points systems, loyalty cards, reward schemes, special offers, competitions etc. recognise that we are motivated to change our behaviour by rewards, either financial or personal.
* Enabling service provision: people often face very real obstacles in changing behaviour – obstacles that are often to do with poverty or personal difficulties. Free education, recycling collections, rehabilitation programmes – are all examples of enabling service provision that make it easier for people to do what is wanted.
* Law and regulation: changes behaviours by controlling it through enforceable laws. Much depends, however, on the ability of the authorities to enforce the law and the levels of public consent for the law.

There is no silver bullet – no single approach works in every case. Local authorities are beginning to explore the conditions within which each of these approaches works best; but much seems to depend both on the context and on the good use of evidence and research. The National Social Marketing Centre stresses the importance of starting from the standpoint of the user, and segmenting audiences effectively, understanding the different needs of the different people with whom you are trying to work.

Joe Simpson, in his piece describing the experience of the first 'telethons', brings out the importance of some of the learning from social marketing: the crucial importance of understanding your audience, making an emotional connection and finding ways to make the desired change enjoyable.

Gillian Norton, in her piece on 'Headlines and a hard slog', illustrates the hard work involved in a sustained initiative to persuade people to reduce the use of private cars. Successful approaches combine a number of actions with a number of different stages; some will be about building consent and democratic support; some about building relationships and encouraging people to interact and feel involved, some will be about designing the environment carefully, or providing support; some may be about providing information or using incentives or disincentives. The optimal combination will change over time, and will emerge through a process of trial and error.

Rachel Litherland and Camilla Child, in their piece 'Why talk about behaviour change?' describes an approach the IDeA and the Tavistock Institute have been developing alongside Brighton & Hove using 'whole systems thinking' and a model of co-production to think differently about how to shift behaviours and attitudes in relation to teenage pregnancy.

Instead of conventional information or marketing campaigns, they have been bringing community members together with frontline staff and partners to explore the issues, challenge, debate – and using a range of methods including individual interviews, community events and action learning sets to deepen understanding and consolidate change.

Behaviour change is never simply a technical fix

In exploring the possible strategies for changing behaviour, we uncover considerable unease about some of the techniques that might be used, and about the legitimate role of government in adopting some of these techniques. As Mathew Taylor says 'the idea of behaviour change as a goal of policy used to seem vaguely sinister'.

One criticism is that behaviour change may be 'sneaky' or manipulative, trying to use psychology to change people's feelings or emotions without engaging with them as rational beings. Different concepts of 'agency' underlie different approaches to behaviour change. Some treat the public as full conscious deliberative individuals, and concentrate on education and persuasion, while others draw upon our underlying habits, desires and conditioned responses.

Another, more widespread, criticism is that governments are meddling beyond the proper boundaries of the role of the state; interfering in people's private lives and in behaviour that harms no-one but themselves. It is no accident that local government leaders and commentators are returning to the work of philosophers – the behaviour change debate recasts a series of debates that philosophers have been having for centuries – between freedom of the individual and the good of society, between liberalism and paternalism, between individualism and utilitarianism.

Polly Toynbee, in her piece for this pamphlet, explores our contradictory responses. On the one hand, voicing concerns about the nanny state, and on the other hand calling for government to take action whenever something goes wrong. She argues that politicians need to 'tread carefully' since public views are often contradictory, and the state can only work with the grain of public opinion.

In workshop discussions, local government leaders express unease about the fairness with which we, as a society, treat the behaviours of others. Is there a class bias in assumptions that smoking is an unacceptable form of self-harm, when hang-gliding, skiing, motor-racing or other dangerous sports are not seen as similarly anti-social?

Are we sometimes enforcing middle-class assumptions about the good life, and trying to control the 'the mass' or the 'underclass' as governments have done for centuries? On the other hand, it is argued, some behaviours are inherently anti-social and if people refuse to comply with the social norms which create civility, we need to prevent them from destroying the peace of mind of their neighbours.

Gillian Norton says that 'talking about behaviour change is a sure fire way of making sure it doesn't happen'. In Richmond, they talked instead to local people about the social 'good' they were trying to achieve – increased recycling, more participation in sport, reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
Any attempt to change the behaviour of citizens must have a concept of 'social good' underpinning it. The values that justify a project to change behaviour must be explicit.

But that does not make it simple. It is because the two important values of 'autonomy', and 'protecting others from harm' are in inevitable tension that any discussion of behaviour change is a discussion about the nature of the society we are trying to create. In the 19th century, individual liberty and autonomy were seen as very precious. It is perhaps a sign of the times that fewer people nowadays make the case for the freedom of individuals to harm themselves.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the consensus supporting collective action that erodes individual freedom, and in a democracy those limits are theoretically set through the political process.

The role and impact of local government
Democratic government, at both national and local level, has to set out the concept of 'social good' that underpins any attempt to change behaviour, and to be clear about 'who decides' what is acceptable. Different approaches have embedded in them, often implicitly, ideas about who makes these decisions.

Is it ministers? The courts? Local communities? Individuals? Local government can play a particularly important role because it is local enough to engage directly in dialogue with communities about the balance of values that 'authorises' any intervention. Capital Ambition recently produced a guide to Behaviour Change that brings together the findings from a series of London collaborative workshops with local government leaders and practitioners. It suggests three key roles for local government in behaviour change:

*Holding a balance between values that are in permanent tension, through a democratic conversation with the local community.
*Creating space for, and building the relationships necessary to enable the 'who decides' question to be satisfactorily answered.
*Creating the ability for communities to act collectively to implement the decisions made.

Once decisions are made, it may be that the provision of services or the regulation of individuals or businesses might be the next step, but there are many other steps that could be taken. Alternatives might include introducing rewards and penalties, or sharing information, supporting community self-help or simply finding ways to enable and encourage individual citizens to act differently. The crucial role is that of holding a democratic conversation with the local community.

Values, feelings and communication

Personal decisions about behaviour change are often strongly affected by personal values and feelings. Emotions play an important role in our commitment to protecting the environment, or to improving our health. So the realm of 'behaviour change' is also about our deepest values and feelings. And yet local government is not well equipped to deal with values and feelings. Discussions tend to be highly technocratic, meetings are low key, work processes worthy but dull. Worries about equity and equality make it hard for local authorities to respond to individual circumstances and individual needs.

But politics is inherently about values. Politicians are, or should be, more comfortable dealing with feelings and emotions, since they form a bridge between the bureaucracy and the public. Much has been written in recent months about the loss of trust in politicians. Part of what needs to be recovered is that sense of politicians playing a role in articulating the values and feelings of local people, ensuring the democratic legitimacy for the balance of values chosen to underpin intervention, and working to secure consent.

At a local level, the leadership of politicians seems to have been a significant success factor in gaining public support for change projects.
Values are not confined to politics, however. In our everyday life, we all carry values, and public services have values inscribed into their every activity. Many local government staff are passionate about their jobs and determined to achieve improvements in the lives of local people. Staff involved in working alongside the public need to be highly conscious of the values they carry, of the way they behave, and of the impact their behaviour has on the behaviour of others.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that council staff have the greatest impact on the behaviour of others by setting an example, building relationships and generating trust and respect by the ways they behave. The public are often on the look-out for hypocrisy – if we want the public to use their cars less, how do council staff get to work? If we want communities to become tolerant and inclusive, what are we doing in our interactions with those communities to make that happen?

To co-produce solutions, as several of the contributors to this SFI pamphlet suggest, we need to create a new 'civil discourse'. Relationships with the public need to be built on honesty and integrity. and staff need to be honest about what can be achieved. By pooling the resources of local people and local organisations, staff need to work with the public to solve problems, rather than trying to pre-empt that discussion by 'providing' solutions.

Peter and Susan Glaser in their piece, identify the need for new skills to enable this to happen. A different sort of conversation, they suggest, will require 'skills in conflict resolution and collaborative dialogue'. Communication needs to change both within local authorities and outside; 'a strong council culture produces employers with a greater commitment and capacity for serving citizens'.

They argue that these communication skills need to enable staff and politicians to be less defensive and to pay attention to criticism, seeing it as 'an opportunity to generate creative solutions to important problems'. Equally important will be the ability to tell the truth and to manage rather than avoid conflict, explaining that 'trust is not a pre-requisite for communication: trust is a by-product of communication'.

A new approach to learning?

Building these sorts of communication skills will involve more attention to learning; and a recognition that conventional training is not adequate to meet the demands of new roles and new relationships. If solutions to complex problems are to be co-produced, staff need to develop their ability to build relationships, to create a sense of reciprocity where promises made are kept on both sides, and to build a deep understanding of the perspectives of others.

We need staff to become more aware of the impact their behaviours have on the behaviours of others. To empower others, staff need to feel empowered. To generate successful shared solutions in conversation with residents, they need to feel able to make promises and agree actions, without taking suggestions back into the bureaucracy for a decision.

Organisations capable of supporting frontline staff in the building of reciprocal relationships within communities would feel very different from our current bureaucracies. Frontline staff and managers would be empowered to negotiate with local people, enabling them to make complex judgements, balance competing priorities and form long term reciprocal relationships.

Managers and staff would be highly conscious of the values they carry, and of the judgements they are trusted to make. Much of our current consultation seeks responses to the council's agenda, and asks about the council's performance, instead of exploring the experiences and feelings of local people about their own lives.

An organisation co-producing solutions would place stress on listening to the experiences and perceptions of local people, and of understanding the lifestyles, choices and values of residents. Conventional 'consultation' would give way to deeper and more interactive communication. Councils such as Barnet are experimenting with ways that the council can intervene using the practices of the life-world-conversation, exploration, chance events – to craft solutions specific to each circumstance, rather than using the bureaucratic approaches that have characterised service delivery and improvement frameworks.

John Atkinson, in his piece draws on the work of Kurt Lewin and Ed Schein to explore the change in mind-set that may be needed. Lewin believed that we are likely to modify our own behaviour when we participate in problem analysis and solution and are more likely to carry out the decisions we help to make. Schein understood that human change involves painful 'unlearning' and that true learning involves us in serious reflection and restructuring our thoughts, perceptions, feelings and attitudes.

Atkinson draws on this to set out the process of 'unfreezing' (through receiving 'disconfirming information' recognising that current ways of doing things may not work), and then 'cognitive redefinition' (finding new ways to 'think' of the solution – using creative forms of learning, from outside our own experience), before 'refreezing' in ways that create change that sticks. The more powerful the learning the process, the more likely it is that managers and staff will feel able to work in new and more fruitful ways.

What next?

Finally, we need to perhaps beware of 'solutions' to behaviour change that come from old patterns of government thinking. The worst thing that could happen would be a national programme of 'behaviour change' – with externally imposed targets, a complex new 'model' of how to change behaviour (complete with complicated diagrams) and a prescribed set of actions for localities to take.

The difficult questions about legitimacy and the role of government in changing behaviour remain. It is through the building of successful relationships and the holding of difficult, tense conversations, that local government will find answers to questions about 'who decides' – creating a context in which individuals and groups within our communities feel sufficiently heard and engaged to offer consent to actions that will shape our behaviours.

Experiments in behaviour change teach the importance of evolving solutions through trial and error, working things out to fit local situations, and working on many levels at once, making sure there is public consent for the change, exploring solutions in partnership with local people, finding practical ways round obstacles, applying common sense and values in complicated situations.

A workshop on behaviour change held last autumn by the London Collaborative and the Leadership Centre for Local Government concluded that what was needed was not another 'toolkit' or pilot initiative, but a different way of thinking. We should not attempt to 'roll-out' successful experiments, or necessarily apply solutions that worked in one locality to other places. Each local situation and community would require an approach that matched local circumstances. Instead the workshop concluded that local leaders needed to do three things if they were serious about playing a role in behaviour change:

*Become clearer, with their whole organisations, about underpinning values and principles.
*Improve their understanding of the values, experiences and views within local communities.
*Share experiences and learning within and between organisations; exploring what leads to success.

As Mathew Taylor suggests, the important thing is not to attempt neatness – clumsy solutions will be the best we can find – using the creative power of difference and conflict – exploring openly and fearlessly, and recognising that there is no single 'mind-set' from which to understand all this, but a fascinating diversity of insights from which we can learn.

Katherine Kerswell is Chief Executive of Northamptonshire County Council and President of SOLACE.

Sue Goss is a Principal in National and Local Services with Office for Public Management (OPM). She has wide experience of working with local, regional and central government.