Case Studies

Defra

The issue: Waste Watch, jointly with Brook Lyndhurst, was commissioned by Defra to investigate and evaluate the evidence of community-based initiatives on the public's waste behaviour.

The challenge: The research focused on how community based behaviour change initiatives are delivered including what tools are used to engage with the public; what the evidence says about project success factors and pitfalls; what evaluation and measurement methods are being used and what lessons can be learned.

Our approach: Our research included scoping the breadth of community-based behaviour change approaches and the delivery agents involved. This was followed by an electronic survey of some 800 organisations involved in behaviour change initiatives, telephone interviews with 80 of these, and in-depth case study interviews with 20 organisations. These ranged from community action groups to social enterprises and local authority driven community engagement.

The results: The study showed that community based approaches have an important part to play in behaviour change strategies. To be more effective, initiatives need support in project and resource planning and measuring the impact of their activities and their efforts need to be more closely joined up with local authority publicity campaigns. The outcomes of this study were used to inform policy development in this area.