Knowledge Co production and Behavioural Change, Collaborative approaches for promoting low carbon mobility

Behavioural change has become regarded as a key tool for policy makers to promote behavioural change that can reduce carbon emissions from personal travel. Yet academic research has suggested that promoting low carbon travel behaviours, in particular those associated with leisure and tourism practices, is particularly challenging because of the highly valued and conspicuous nature of the consumption involved. Accordingly, traditional top-down approaches to developing behavioural change campaigns have largely been ineffectual in this field and this chapter explores innovative ways to understand and develop behavioural change campaigns that are driven from the bottom upwards. In doing so, we draw on emergent literature from management studies and social marketing to explore how ideas of service dominant logic can be used to engage consumers in developing each stage of a behavioural change campaign. Using data and insights from research conducted in the south-east of the UK, we outline and evaluate the process for co-producing knowledge about low carbon travel and climate change. We illustrate how behavioural change campaign creation can be an engaging, lively and productive process of knowledge and experience sharing. The chapter ends by considering the role that co-production and co-creation can have in developing strategies for low carbon mobility and, more broadly, the ways in which publics understand and react to anthropogenic climate change.

Low Carbon Mobility, Urgent futures and radical transitions

More people than ever before are moving more frequently and at accelerating speeds, often for shorter periods of time. These mobilities are largely dependent on unsustainable high-carbon technologies. The continued and accelerating growth of transportation emissions is attributed to changing mobility patterns among the high emitters of hypermobile developed societies, combined with the rapid development of high carbon intensity transport systems in emerging economies. Mitigation of transport emissions remains largely absent from the political agenda, despite growing recognition of the urgent need to address transportation emissions, because it is fundamentally incompatible with neoliberal ideals. The level of decarbonisation required to align regional and global transportation systems with the agreed targets of the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) has proved to be a particularly acute challenge. The Agreement recognises that radical and system-wide transitions toward low carbon mobility are urgently required. It is critically important that the varied social, cultural and geographic contexts of low carbon mobility transitions that are identified in Low Carbon Mobility Transitions are taken up and acted upon to inform the low carbon mobility transformations that are so obviously and urgently required. These insights must inform efforts to ensure the full accountability of transportation emissions, and to ensure that the INDCs that are outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) are upheld and achieved in full measure.

Transitioning to Low Carbon Mobility

Since the turn of the 21st Century, the world has experienced unprecedented economic, political, social and environmental transformation. The ‘inconvenient truth’ of climate change is now undeniable; rising temperatures and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events have resulted in the loss of lives, livelihoods and habitats as well as straining economies. Increasingly mobile lives are often dependent on high carbon modes of transport, representing a substantial contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the underlying cause of anthropogenic climate change. With growing demand and rising emissions, the transport sector has a critical role to play in achieving GHG emissions reductions, and stabilising the global climate. Low Carbon Mobility Transitions draws interdisciplinary insights on transport and mobilities, as a vast and complex socio-technical system. It presents 15 chapters and 6 shorter ‘case studies’ covering a diversity of themes and geographic contexts across three thematic sections: People and Place, Structures in Transition, and Innovations for Low Carbon Mobility. The three sections are highly interrelated, and with overlapping, complementing, and challenging themes. The contributions offer critical, often neglected insights into low carbon mobility transitions across the world. In doing so, Low Carbon Mobility Transitions sheds light on the place- and context-specific nature of mobility in a climate constrained world.

Hypermobile Business and Leisure Lifestyles, will wellbeing concerns stimulate environmental co benefits

This chapter examines the negative consequences for individuals who undertake leisure-motivated lifestyle mobilities or frequent business travel, and considers these movements in light of their potentially differing impacts on climate change. It explores the question of whether adherents of hypermobile lifestyles will be willing to change their mobility patterns based on negative personal consequences. This is a crucial question to ask as the literature suggests that the hypermobile are largely unwilling to change their travel behaviour for environmental reasons alone. The potential for behaviour change based on concerns over wellbeing is instead examined, and it is concluded that while some forms of leisure-motivated lifestyle mobility may entail less high-emission movement, it is unlikely that concern over lifestyle mobilities’ personal consequences will lead to behavioural change. In contrast, it is within frequent business travel, which tends to require frequent air travel (with its concomitant higher emissions), where the consequences of this hypermobility can entail severe physiological costs, that the most leverage for behavioural change based on concerns over personal wellbeing exists. The chapter concludes that it is business- rather than leisure-motivated hypermobile lifestyles that present the most promising realm for achieving low carbon mobility transitions.

The Challenges of Changing the Paradigms, Regimes and Structures of Low Carbon Mobility

The chapter provides an introduction to some of the issues associated with enabling low carbon mobility transitions. It first discusses issues of regime change and transition and highlights the need for specific types of transition. It is argued that the nature of desired regime change appears to inherently require the involvement of the state and therefore this also raises significant issues of policy change and learning. The chapter then discusses the complexity of multi-scale transitions and the extent to which this raises issues of agency and structure, with emphasis on the capability to enable transition and positive change itself being related to different framing of policy interventions and learning. The chapter then concludes by noting the limitations of capacities to enable low carbon mobility transitions without there being third degree policy learning and major paradigm change.

Innovations to Transform Personal Mobility

Given the many adverse environmental and social effects caused by personal mobility across the planet, there is an urgent need for policy and governance that genuinely encourages and supports innovations in clean and socially just forms of mobility. The geographical complexities of peak car and the renaissance of rail and bike suggest both the importance of, and need for, innovation in the mobility of people, goods and information. This chapter argues that innovation processes in personal mobility are social and geographical in nature and therefore require the bringing together of thinking from innovation studies, such as the work on socio-technical transitions, with theorising from geography and urban studies. It introduces thinking on socio-technical transitions and then explores geographers’ responses to this approach. The chapter selectively refers to empirical research into innovation processes in personal mobility in several UK cities – Oxford, Brighton, Liverpool and London. This research relies on document analysis; interviews with local entrepreneurs, policymakers, politicians and activists; and limited mobile ethnography. It recognises that ‘innovation’ is a polysemic, value-laden term and uses the deliberatively broad description of a configuration of heterogeneous elements – technical artefacts, designs, practices of consumption, business models, etcetera – that is new(ish) to an arbitrarily defined area.

The Underlying Structures of Low Carbon Mobility

This chapter shows that electric transport technologies along with renewable natural gas and biofuels can provide the low carbon mobility base for the future but that structural changes reducing the need to travel by car, truck and plane are also needed for this transition. The potential for creating cities free of automobile dependence now enables us to create oil-free cities that are strongly economically competitive and highly live­able. The technologies and practices outlined suggest that we can be oil-free by 2050 and renewably based oil-free by 2100 as outlined by the IPCC. The structural changes outlined suggest that the changes in transportation, urban design and city planning, are well underway but must continue if we are to meet global carbon goals. Continuing reduction in automobile dependence and the growth in new technologies can enable us to create cities that are oil-free, based on options that are viable and attractive.

Low carbon transition – potentials and limitations for tour operators

There is little doubt that emissions from tourism must be reduced. A low carbon transition tends to be debated within the existing growth-centred and fossil fuel-driven political economy; this offers potentials but also sets limitations. The role of businesses in climate change is complex. From a political economy perspective, businesses are crucial actors in reducing emissions, simply through their decisions around products and operations. Yet a political economy approach also sees governance and business as interlinked. Businesses can influence governance, though they do not shape rules and norms in isolation. They are influenced by the dynamic regulatory, discursive, technological, and productive environment, in which they operate. This case study provides evidence from tour operators, which are addressing emissions from their products and operations, but also demonstrates that the context in which tourism businesses operate sets limitations to how much change may be implemented. The chapter argues that debates around a low carbon transition for tourism need to take into consideration the complexity of corporate, economic, environmental, political, and consumer interests and their links and interactions.

Opening Cape Town streets for a low carbon future

Cape Town’s apartheid spatial form and historically under resourced public transport system has created a resource inefficient city. Providing additional financial resources to upgrade the public transport system will not be sufficient to encourage a shift to low carbon alternatives. To create a low carbon future for Cape Town a deeper level of change is required – a radical transformation in the way different people and places are valued within the present urban context. This case study analyses a civil society movement called Open Streets through the lens of transition theory. It suggests that this movement is a niche development in which a transformation of the way people and places are valued could occur. While this movement has been well received and appears to have potential to help shift the regime of urban transport system in Cape Town, there remains a series of organisational, logistical, regulatory and funding barriers that are hampering its full development and long-term impact.

Achieving a low carbon transition in Japan, the role of motor vehicle lifetime

In order to achieve climate change mitigation goals, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Japan’s household sector is critical. Accomplishing a transition to low carbon and energy efficient consumer goods is particularly valuable as a policy tool for reducing emissions in the residential sector. This case study presents an analysis of the lifetime of personal vehicles in Japan, and considers the optimal scenario in terms of retention and disposal, specifically as it relates to GHG emissions. Using data from Japan, the case study shows the critical importance of including whole-of-life energy and carbon calculations when assessing the contributions that new technologies can make towards low carbon mobility transitions. While energy-efficiency gains are important, replacing technologies can overlook the energy and carbon embedded in the production phase. Without this perspective, policy designed to reduce GHG emissions may result in increased emissions and further exacerbate global climate change.