Project Title
Fair and trusted transitions: An Ecological Approach to Legitimacy in Sustainability Transitions
Behavioral change(s) addressed
When looking at individuals as citizens, I study public responses to transition policies, projects, and products, asking what people think about them and to what extent these perceptions shape their willingness to support them. I also study private-sphere behavior, or the individual as a consumer, linking (sustainable) consumption decisions with signaling motivations, such as how people make sustainable choices to manage the impressions they convey to others and whether such costly signals are perceived as genuine by those others. Similarly, more recently, I have started to apply this signaling and reputation-management perspective to explore how people react to sustainable acts and commitments publicly displayed by different institutions. Here, I ask whether such signals are believed, whether people interpret these acts as signals of good or bad faith, and how this affects the extent to which they trust the institutions themselves. As such, the behavioral change I ultimately look at in my work is not only whether people are changing what they do, but also whether institutions are doing their part in the eyes of the people.
Theoretical approach
My approach centres on legitimacy in sustainability transitions, and in particular on how perceptions of fairness and trust shape whether people support, tolerate, or resist transition policies, projects, and the institutions behind them. I see legitimacy not as a fixed property of a policy, project or institution, but as something that emerges through the interaction between the individual, the institution, and the broader social and cultural context. At the individual level, people bring their own values, worldviews, and dispositions towards trust or cynicism (to name a few), which shape how they interpret transition-related developments. At the institutional level, perceptions are shaped by what institutions do, the signals they communicate, and their history and previous actions. At the level of the broader context, the meaning of a policy or institutional action is also shaped by the wider social and cultural environment, including prevailing norms, experiences, and the characteristics of other policies or institutions with which it is associated. This ecological perspective means that the same institution, policy, or transition project may be perceived as legitimate by some publics and not by others, depending on the interaction between these different levels. As such, I intend for my work to not only capture whether people find a particular sustainable technology or policy acceptable, but also to help understand why and under what conditions they regard the actors and processes driving sustainability transitions as trustworthy, fair, and legitimate.
Empirical research strategies
Experiments are my default -mostly using vignette studies and factorial designs and I combine this with cross-sectional survey work and, when possible and desirable, longitudinal approaches.
Possibilities for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration
Multiple. Luckily my work on how people respond to policies, projects, and technologies related to sustainability has brought me closer to people in the chemical and fuels industries, energy technology, as well as colleagues from other social sciences looking at transitions from a more societal perspective (e.g., sociology). Happy to chat more about potential collaborations.
Social transition(s) addressed
I am an Assistant Professor of Social and Environmental Psychology at the Environmental Psychology Department of the University of Groningen. My work addresses what people think about sustainability transitions, including but not limited to those related to energy, food, and the circular economy. These transitions share a feature that makes them interesting from a social-psychological perspective: they are often technically feasible but publicly contested. Indeed, although most sustainability transitions partly depend on technological maturity, technological readiness alone often does not guarantee their public acceptability. Instead, multiple individual (e.g, values), social (e.g., trust), and governance- and justice-related factors (e.g., fairness) underlie whether people are willing to embrace the proposed low-carbon alternatives aimed at replacing existing fossil-intensive processes and products. A clear example can be found in the Northern Netherlands, where the legacy of natural gas extraction in Groningen has damaged trust in the very institutions now asking the public to host infrastructure projects for potentially low-carbon alternatives for the energy transition, such as hydrogen.