BOOK: Evaluating Behaviour Change Interventions

Evaluating Behaviour Change Interventions: A Practical Guide

2023

McLeod LJ, Howard TM, Driver AB, Hine DW 2023. Evaluating Behaviour Change Interventions: A Practical Guide, Centre for Invasive Species Solutions. 38 p.

ABSTRACT

Scientists are very good at developing technologies and recommended best practices for managing sustainable land management problems. But these proposed solutions will fail unless the public – land managers and community members – are sufficiently empowered and motivated to modify behaviours and adopt new approaches.

Changing behaviour, and sustaining these changes over time, is a difficult process. Educating the public about adverse impacts, and providing information about control strategies, is rarely enough.

Behaviour change interventions require a more sophisticated approach, informed by behavioural sciences. Social psychology and behavioural economics have generated an array of intervention strategies and behaviour change techniques designed to increase audience understanding, engagement and, ultimately, adoption of desired behaviours.

‘Designing Behaviour Change Interventions for Sustainable Land Management: A Practical Guide’ (Hine, McLeod and Driver, 2022) provides a systematic approach for practitioners to develop new behaviour change interventions.

There are four principles to follow:

1. Focus on behaviour.

2. Know your audience.

3. Match your interventions to the primary causes of behaviour.

4. Evaluate, review and reflect.

This guide focuses on the principle ‘Evaluate, review and reflect and reflect’. It provides practitioners with a systematic approach for developing and implementing an appropriate evaluation plan for their intervention. A practical case study (involving domestic cat management) is used throughout, to demonstrate the theory content.