This is the original text of a piece I wrote with Kieran Stigant for today’s Local Government Chronicle, highlighting what we’re up to in West Sussex. There are a number of local authorities starting to beef up their behaviour change approach - my view is that we need to ‘professionalise’ it, without stifling any of the innovation and enthusiasm. To this end, it was great to see Paul Martin (Chief Exec of the London Borough of Sutton) calling for IDeA to step up its game on behaviour change, under Rob Whiteman’s leadership, in his companion piece to this article.

More specifically on behaviour change to reduce emissions, I’m pretty sure that a behaviour-led - or at least behaviour-aware - policy framework is the way to go. This can incorporate all the technical interventions that are needed (and expected of local government), without losing sight of the need for changing behaviour.

Warren Hatter and Kieran Stigant argue that it’s time for local government to develop its approach to behaviour change policy and practice.

Talk to most Chief Execs these days, and you’ll realise that they have more than a passing interest in behaviour change. At one level, this is intellectual curiosity: there are always new ideas being mulled over, and Nudge, making the case for ‘libertarian paternalism’, has been required reading since David Cameron put it on a reading list for Conservative MPs in summer 2008.

However, the main reason for this interest has been the realisation that the major challenges faced by decision-makers in the public sector are not going to be solved simply by smarter government.

This realisation – effectively recognising the limits of good government – is troubling for anyone who has been successful through the era of managerialism and New Public Management. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the curiosity about how to elicit ‘good’ behaviour change has yet to solidify into a recognised stream of effective local practice. There is no orthodoxy on how to do it; behaviour change work is not recognised in local government as a professionalism; and there is not even a ‘behaviour change agenda’ to speak of.

In West Sussex we have, over time, developed and supported a sizeable number of initiatives, whose success is predicated on behaviour change by individuals, communities and businesses. And the thread running through most of them is sustainable, lower-carbon lifestyles.

Examples include the Better Tomorrrows’s (a Community Interest Company) promotion of waste prevention, the work of the independent Greening Campaign with local communities on lower carbon behaviours, and the WSCC Sustainable Business Partnership’s work supporting SMEs in becoming more resource efficient. And there are plenty others.

An analysis of our current work was encouraging in many ways. Most of our pro-environmental initiatives are low cost, generating positive outcomes. However, the analysis also revealed weaknesses, mostly linked to the reality that the initiatives have been driven by ‘wilful individuals’ with a sense of mission. In particular:

•we lack a systematic approach as an authority – or through professional networks - for sharing learning on what works, and no systematic way of assessing which behaviours to target, and which methods to use;

•we use a wide range of different brands and communications approaches, and had not considered the potential benefits of more co-ordination; and

•we have no consistent approach to evaluating how effective our behaviour change initiatives are.

This analysis has forced us to take a step back, and consider why behaviour change matters in the field of sustainability - particularly when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Essentially, when we look at the emissions in the County, which need to reduce drastically, we recognise that the County Council’s own emissions, and those of the district councils, police, health, etc add up to a very small proportion of the total. So, unless we rely on a massive technical innovation enabling residents’ energy needs to be met sustainably in the very near future, it is only through major behaviour change within communities that we can achieve the emissions cuts required.

This is uncomfortable news for local government, because it draws us towards concentrating on issues over which we have little control. But, if local authorities do not take the lead on reducing community emissions, who is going to?

How are we responding to these findings? Clearly, there is much to do developing strategy and policy; this issue affects every service area, and every aspect of our promise to residents. As well as developing the strategic framework, we are developing at a more practical level:

•a coherent, co-ordinated approach to communications and branding in relation to climate, carbon and behaviour change;

•a consistent approach to evaluating behaviour change and emissions; and

•build internal capacity to support our behaviour change work.

In particular, we are investigating how to develop our behaviour change practice. We have behaviour change ‘experts’ within the authority and around the County, and we are working out how to draw together this expertise. We want to collaborate with others - in local government and elsewhere - to support this, perhaps developing a community of practice or ‘behaviour change academy’.

We are keen to play our part in local government’s drive to work more effectively on behaviour change.

Kieran Stigant is Executive Director for Communities at West Sussex County Council. Warren Hatter is policy advisor to WSCC on behaviour and climate change.