Let’s talk about the distinction between individual and collective action on climate.
Most people associate individual action with actions taken by one person, made on an individual basis. Collective action is then actions taken by many people on a collective basis. But this is often where the analysis ends. How do we move from individual to collective action, and is one more effective than the other? In the context of climate communications, this distinction can lead to misunderstandings if not fully explored. Both types of action can have real impact, and people rarely (read never) make decisions in isolation. It’s the psychological and social contexts that define when individual actions scale up to the collective, and only a systems-based analysis of an action will tell us if it can have real impact at scale.
Take biking to work or eating vegetarian as examples. If you tell people that individual decisions around transportation and food systems are not so important, and instead they should really focus on collective action, you have disempowered those individuals. In standing up a false dichotomy between individual and collective action, you have missed out on major avenues for action.
We should really be thinking in terms of systemic vs. reductionist approaches to climate action instead. Telling people they should be tracking their carbon footprint (cough, BP) is a reductionist approach because it hinges on an individual-by-individual decarbonization of the economy, when we are all embedded in social-ecological systems. Similarly, corporate carbon footprints can be a reductive non-solution when decoupled from the systems that company belongs to.
If lots of people begin biking to work because their friends do it, it’s fun, and there are safe bike paths for them, then we start to see what a systems-based solution might look like. Instead of switching producers, companies can pursue systems change by transforming existing supply chains, ending political or financial contributions to the fossil fuel industry, or reducing promotion of consumerism. In these models, the world begins to emerge as a collection of nested systems instead of an elaborate accounting exercise.
When we boil things down solely to individual versus collective action, we’re not thinking clearly about what takes an individual action and makes it collective, and what actually makes a difference on climate change. I can think of many individual and collective actions that are both impactful and non-impactful on climate change. A systems approach lets us examine the nested systems and think about what our greatest levers for action are.
Collective action is the gold standard, but how do we get there? After we’ve analyzed a potential solution from a systems level, making it a collective action requires leveraging a deeper understanding of psychological and social concepts. We employ these at Living Air Communications in our work. Borrowing from Per Espen Stoknes’ book, What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Climate Change (2015), solutions should be social, supportive, simple, story-based, and use signals (indicators) to gauge societal feedback. Without too much elaboration, these principles give us a roadmap to scale individual actions to collective heights. They also give us a deeper framework than individual versus collective action. All actions are undertaken by individuals, but how they are perceived by the individual, and how that individual sees themself as part of a larger system make all the difference.
In our work at Living Air Communications, we focus on collective action problems. Everything we do is meant to inspire, motivate, and/or educate individuals to act as a collective on climate action. We see two main problems: 1) organizations educating individuals on climate by leaning on doom-and-gloom messaging that undermines motivation to act; and, 2) solution advocacy that is detached from underlying principles of behavior.
We tackle both problems at once, helping you make a difference by using our specific knowledge in climate messaging and behavior to develop strategy, content, and campaigns that drive systemic, collective action.