Third sector organisations’ role in pro-environmental behaviour change – a review of the literature and evidence

A range of actors, including government, third sector organisations (TSOs) and academics, have claimed recently that third sector organisations (TSOs) can play an important role in supporting people to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. These claims often refer to TSOs' potential to innovate, their proximity to citizens and their trustworthiness, as well as the role of collective action and small-group interventions. This paper reviews these different claims as well as the evidence that has been offered to date on the role of TSOs in pro-environmental behaviour change. We find that there is indeed some evidence that participation in environmental third sector initiatives can facilitate certain changes in people's day to day lives, particularly when it comes to 'low hanging fruits' such as increasing recycling or switching off appliances. However, the review also identifies a range of challenges that TSOs experience in their work, including engaging the broader public around climate change or other environmental issues, scaling up practice change to a wider audience and a lack of resources to sustain successful initiatives. Finally, the paper argues that there is a need for further discussion on a range of issues related to empirical research in this area, including methodological challenges of examining behaviour change and the more differentiated assessments that take organisational form, nature of intervention and type of targeted behaviour into account.