Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity

Published by WWF-UK, this book argues that mainstream approaches to environmental campaigning - focused on policy change or individual behaviour change - largely ignore the role of human identity in shaping responses to environmental challenges. Crompton and Kasser argue that many current environmental campaigns inadvertently reinforce the very aspects of identity (materialism, extrinsic values, threat-driven defensiveness) that drive unsustainable behaviour in the first place, drawing on values theory - including Schwartz's circumplex model of values - and self-determination theory to make this case. The book proposes that lasting engagement with environmental challenges requires deliberately activating more helpful, intrinsic aspects of identity rather than relying on fear, guilt or narrow self-interest, and closes by identifying common ground between environmental campaigning and other social justice movements that share this identity-based analysis.