Is There a Role for Behaviour Scientists in Climate Change Adaptation Policy?

Adapting to climate change requires multiple actors and institutions across society to change practices, from local communities and civil society groups to businesses and governments. For example, farmers need to switch to crops better suited to more frequent and intense floods and droughts. Financial institutions must factor climate risks into their investment decisions. Public officials need to work more closely across sectors and levels of government to develop comprehensive solutions.

How far these changes go, at both the individual and collective levels, depends in part on the policies and regulations governments put in place. Most countries now have public policies, such as national adaptation plans, long-term development strategies, and sector policies, that set out their vision and priorities for climate adaptation. These public policies can drive the shift in individual and collective behaviour needed to adapt to climate change, but only if they get the approach right. Because the actors and decisions involved are all interconnected, effective climate adaptation policies need a systems approach, not a piecemeal one.

Behavioural science is often presented as a tool for improving the effectiveness of public policy. It can contribute by gathering evidence on what key actors currently do and why, helping to identify where behaviour change is most needed and feasible. Yet few climate adaptation policies to date reflect evidence from behavioural science on what shapes people’s actions and on the decisions that different actors will need to make to adapt to a changing climate. At a time when resources are limited, an important question arises: can behavioural insights help strengthen climate adaptation policies by supporting the actions urgently needed across systems, whether they are institutions, regions, value chains, or communities?

Behavioural science can improve public policies. 

Behavioural science is a fast-growing field that is becoming increasingly relevant in policy-making, particularly through what is known as behavioural public policy, an approach that draws on behavioural insights to improve the effectiveness and adoption of public policies. Interest in this field grew rapidly following the 2008 publication of Nudge and the creation of the United Kingdom’s first government behavioural insights unit in 2010. Since then, many governments have integrated behavioural science into their policy-making processes. 

Research in behavioural science shows that decisions are often more automatic than we might think. 

What we are paying attention to in the moment, our mindset, our emotions, and what we believe others are doing all play a part in what we do.

 

 We weigh immediate costs and benefits more heavily than larger future ones; we take more risks when we feel we are missing out; and we are constantly looking at what others are doing to guide our own behaviour—if everyone else is doing something, it can’t be that bad. Yet for decades, policies have largely ignored these insights. A policy that is sound on paper can stall if people do not behave the way it assumes they will.

What is preventing climate adaptation policy from integrating behavioural insights? 

Real-world evidence on how behavioural insights can inform climate adaptation policy design and implementation remains limited. This is despite its potential and the growing evidence base on how people perceive climate risks and what influences their climate change adaptation. Few researchers and practitioners work at the intersection of climate adaptation, public policy, and behavioural science, creating a gap between the needs of climate adaptation teams and the methods behavioural scientists offer. Why is this? Two reasons stand out. 

The nature of climate adaptation policies 

One reason lies in the nature of climate adaptation policy itself, which varies considerably in form and specificity. Since climate change affects every sector and level of government, from national to local, countries often end up with a patchwork of climate adaptation policies. These can include climate laws, national adaptation plans, sector-specific adaptation strategies, and adaptation measures built into broader development plans. A behavioural analysis of any climate adaptation challenge therefore requires an understanding of this complex policy mix, including the overlaps, gaps, and even conflicts among these policies. 

Beyond this diversity in policy form, countries also vary in the specificity of their policy instruments. Some define broad priorities, such as improving water security or promoting climate-smart agriculture, without specifying who should act, how, or when. Others are far more concrete. For example, the National Early Action Protocol for Cyclone in Bangladesh includes sector-specific early actions, such as installing protective nets to prevent fish from being washed out of ponds at the community level, and, at the institutional level, organizing a market for fish farmers to sell their cultured fish, naming the key organizations responsible for each action. 

These differences in specificity matter for applying behavioural science. It is generally easier to identify behavioural challenges and solutions in policy instruments that clearly define specific adaptation measures, each focused on a single behaviour, such as city-level drought plans. High-level frameworks, such as national adaptation plans, by contrast, are broader and less specific, making it harder to pinpoint which behaviours need to change and where interventions are most needed to achieve a particular adaptation goal. As a result, policy-makers and the practitioners who help develop and implement climate adaptation policies often have no clear ask for behavioural scientists, even though behavioural scientists’ ultimate role is to help enable specific behaviours.

The narrow focus of behavioural science applied to public policy

A second reason behind behavioural science’s limited use in climate adaptation policy lies in how it is currently applied to public policy. So far, it has played a narrow role, confined to influencing the behaviour of a single actor, typically at the local, consumer level. The deeper diagnostic work is in mapping systems of actors, such as farmers, processors, financiers, private companies, and policy-makers themselves, to identify which behaviours, and whose, should be targeted to achieve a particular objective.

Many behavioural policy interventions have concentrated on influencing the behaviour of consumers and end users, paying far less attention to other actors whose decisions may carry greater weight in solving a given problem. The focus has largely been on nudging individuals and households toward a single behaviour, whether that is increasing or decreasing an action, or starting or stopping it altogether. Examples include nudges to reduce waste, pay taxes on time, use less energy, or, in the context of climate adaptation, adopt a specific technology, such as drought-tolerant seeds. As a result, there are few examples of behavioural science being applied at a broader systems level, such as a community, region, or value chain, leaving policy-makers and climate adaptation practitioners with limited guidance on what kinds of behavioural changes are needed, or even possible.

Climate adaptation as a web of decisions: Who else needs to change?

At first glance, these two reasons behind behavioural science’s limited use in climate adaptation policy may seem contradictory. But the need for specificity and the need for a systems approach are not in tension: achieving a given climate adaptation goal, such as reducing riverbank erosion from flooding, requires first clarifying whose behaviour needs to change and whether the behaviour of other actors in the system must also shift to make that possible. This means resisting the temptation to default to whoever is easiest or most familiar to reach.

Consider vetiver, a fast-growing, deep-rooted grass used as an ecosystem-based adaptation solution, planted along riverbanks to bind soil and slow erosion from flooding. In Fiji in 2019–2020, the government supplied several riverine communities with the grass, paid them to plant it, and ran a short training session. Three years on, little of it had survived. A recent IISD and Rare project set out to understand why, examining everything from whether people trusted that vetiver works to whether upkeep was anyone’s clear responsibility.
 

The findings kept pointing beyond the individual. Villagers attributed riverbank erosion as much to drainage from new public roads and gravel extracted from the riverbed as to anything they themselves had done (or not done) to affect slope stability. Earlier governance changes had left villages with less authority to enforce local rules, and the rollout of vetiver planting programs had reached mainly men, not the women who also depend on the riverbanks. None of these decisions were made by the villagers, yet each shaped what they could and would do. 

Much of the agency over whether the planting could be sustained sat upstream, with people other than those being asked to plant.

 

In community-based adaptation actions, the key actor isn’t necessarily the person at the end of the chain but someone “upstream,” whose single decision shifts the conditions for everyone around them. 

In our vetiver example, policy-makers had a clear articulation of the actual behaviour they wanted to change (riverine farmers planting and sustaining vetiver grass). In other cases, policy-makers may not know the actual behaviour they need to change to advance a particular adaptation goal. Regardless of the entry point, policy-makers and climate adaptation practitioners need a clear, specific adaptation outcome or goal (in our example: reducing riverbank erosion from more frequent and intense flooding in specific locations in Fiji), paired with a clear picture of the behaviours required by different actors within a particular system—whether a community, organization, sector, or region—to achieve that adaptation goal.

The role of behavioural scientists is to gather evidence on what these key actors currently do—and why—as a basis for identifying where behaviour change is needed and feasible within the system. They then need to prioritize interventions based on which actors have the most power to influence adaptation outcomes and drive systemic change. In our vetiver example, this means looking not just at the farmers expected to plant vetiver, but also at other actors that affect this outcome, such as private enterprises responsible for gravel extraction and authorities responsible for enforcing riverbank management laws and regulations.

What is holding behavioural science back from working at the system level?

Behavioural science is not limited to applications where outcomes are easy to measure, the targets are consumers or “end users,” and the behaviour to be changed is predefined. Behavioural scientists are piloting new approaches, such as behavioural systems mapping, to understand how the choices of different actors interact with and shape a given system. Three factors hold behavioural science back from working at the system level. 

Initial pressure to demonstrate its value to policy-makers through rapid, easy fixes

The narrow focus of behavioural science on influencing individual “end-user” decisions has a clear rationale: achieving quick, visible, and low-cost results to demonstrate its value to policy-makers. But complex challenges such as climate adaptation call for different approaches, since the target groups and specific behaviours involved cannot always be predetermined at the outset. For an issue like improving drought management in a particular region, it may be too restrictive to fix on a single behaviour to influence from the start. Considering a broader set of actors and behaviours instead can help identify which behaviour is most worth targeting in the first place.

Vested interests that resist more difficult, systemic analysis

Working at the broader system level is genuinely difficult in practice. One obstacle is vested interests: those within the system may not recognize that achieving the change they are seeking requires adjusting their own behaviour

Climate adaptation teams have also typically developed policies with limited transformational potential, looking at each sector in isolation and focusing on a single climate hazard and a small set of actors. This reflects a classic status quo bias: climate adaptation practitioners and policy-makers are more inclined to continue doing what they understand and are familiar with, which leads them to favour incremental changes—for example, building the seawall higher to protect against sea level rise rather than replacing it with nature-based solutions.

Lack of proof of concept 

How behavioural science can effectively support climate adaptation policy, using a systems approach, remains an open question. For example, we explored how behavioural insights could improve drought management policy for pastoralists in Northern Kenya’s arid and semi-arid regions without identifying a specific behaviour in advance. However, the scale of the issue made it difficult to produce a clear, understandable systems map or to draw clear pathways from that map to behaviourally informed policy recommendations.

Bridging the gap: A call for deeper collaboration among behavioural scientists, climate change adaptation practitioners, and policy-makers.

We have argued that effective climate adaptation policy requires a systems approach: one that recognizes that any adaptation goal depends on the decisions and actions of multiple, interconnected actors. In practice, this means that policy-makers and practitioners who help develop and implement climate adaptation policies must identify which behaviours, from which actors, are needed to achieve a given goal within a particular system, whether a community, organization, sector, or region. 

Behavioural scientists can contribute by gathering evidence on what these key actors currently do and why. This evidence serves two purposes: (i) identifying where behaviour change is needed and feasible within the system and (ii) prioritizing interventions based on which actors have the most power to influence adaptation outcomes and drive systemic change.

So far, however, behavioural science as applied to public policy has only just begun to adopt this systemic approach, leaving practical guidance for developing more effective, behaviourally informed adaptation policies still limited. Closing that gap will require closer collaboration among policy-makers, adaptation practitioners, and behavioural scientists, as well as a shared commitment to thinking in systems rather than isolated interventions.

Adaptation practitioners and policy-makers need the tools of behavioural science to widen their toolkit for understanding human behaviour, while behavioural scientists need to identify new entry points within the policy-making process—ones that go beyond individual behaviour change at the local, community level.

The following actions would go a long way:  

• For policy-makers working on adaptation: Bring behavioural science in early, at the problem definition and policy formulation stages, rather than at implementation. Most applications of behaviour science so far have fine-tuned existing policies after the fact, adjusting how they are delivered. If they are brought in at the start, while the problem is still being framed, behavioural science can help reframe it through a behavioural lens, identifying which behaviours a policy targets and whose decisions it aims to move, before the harder constraints are locked in.
• For adaptation practitioners: Map priority adaptation measures (such as scaling up ecosystem-based adaptation or integrating adaptation into budgeting processes) as a system of decisions (for example, who is supposed to do what to scale up ecosystem-based adaptation), and identify which actor or set of actors holds the agency to influence these decisions, recognizing that advancing an adaptation measure typically depends on multiple actors rather than one. Tracing how the choices of farmers, lenders, officials, and regulators hold one another in place reveals where a single change would have the furthest reach, rather than simply targeting whoever is easiest to reach.
• For behaviour scientists: Communicate what you can bring to climate adaptation teams and how, using clear examples and avoiding behavioural science jargon. Keep in mind that climate adaptation experts are already attentive to the drivers of adaptation behaviour, so framing your contribution in relation to their existing expertise will help set realistic, shared expectations for what behavioural science can add.
• For policy-makers, adaptation practitioners, and behavioural scientists: Invest in the collaboration and evidence this depends on. The most useful next step is patient, shared work among all three groups, with enough resources to build cross-disciplinary understanding and allow researchers to begin generating evidence in these more complex, layered decision-making settings.