no one is to blame, but everyone's complicit: the necessity of practice-based theories of change

As I develop the research programme here at Worldbuilding Agency, I'm going to dig quite deeply into practice-based theories of change, because I think they offer a way out of the regrettably tech-obsessed paradigm that still dominates the futures business.

One might wonder, however—and not unreasonably!—why a theory of change is even necessary. The best answer to that question is that if you don't have a defined theory of change, then you're uncritically using the one that's implicit in the way we do things already. The point of this essay, then, is to bring those assumptions to the surface, and point out why they're not helpful.

With apologies for the sweeping paraphrase of a truism: futures and foresight work is about change, far more than it's about "the future". But I would go further, and say that it's also (or perhaps only) about how change itself changes. Change, after all, happens all the time, without any particular need for consultants or researchers! So, if you're intervening in an institution or an organisation, in a state or in a small community, then you're trying to shape the sort of change that's always-already occurring, right?

(Think of it as being a bit like the difference between velocity and acceleration: the latter is the measure of how the former changes over time.)

Already we're into the weeds of abstraction! In what follows, I'm going to do my best to concretise the issue, and illustrate the point by explaining why a theory of change is necessary to my work, and how the nature of that work led me to the particular theory I use. For those of you who like an abstract overview, however, it might be helpful to recall my discussion a few weeks back of what Karl Schroeder calls the "express elevator" approach to foresight, whereby two seemingly opposed explanations or understandings of a phenomenon are held to be simultaneously valid. It is in that sense that a practice-based theory of change is an attempt to take the conceptual tension between structure and agency as the ground upon which the work must be done.

It will make sense by the end of the essay, trust me!

getting beyond behaviourism

I suspect that one major reason I don't share the default theory of change is that I came to the question through my PhD, which was (on one level) about understanding infrastructure as a potential site of intervention with regard to reducing human impacts on the environment. (We'll leave aside the definitional problems around ideas like "human impact" and "the environment" for today, but you can believe they'll be returned to!)

The majority of approaches to intervening in the things that people do are fundamentally behaviourist in character. Behaviourism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early C20th, as that discipline attempted to become more capable of doing rigorous empirical work. I'm not even going to attempt to summarise the entire behaviourist paradigm, because it's way too long and large a story; the core idea is that human behaviour is the result of conditioning, which is to say it's shaped by external factors such as environment cues and other stimuli. The paradigmatic behaviourist would be B F Skinner, who famously trained pigeons and rats to press switches by rewarding them with food.

(It's worth acknowledging here that in recent years the behaviourist model has begun giving way to a more cognitive psychology, though it takes a long time for these things to go from the academic leading edge to everyday deployment. Furthermore, while cognitive psychology is surely an improvement on the behaviourist model, it's not as much of one as it could be.)

In other words, if you're a state trying to shape the behaviours of your citizens (or if you're a firm trying to sell more widgets), your basic model of change will be to assume that you can train people as if they were very complicated rats or pigeons. Thankfully, pure Skinnerean behaviourism doesn't hold water in the context of contemporary capitalism, but it's worth thinking about why that might be: operant conditioning, per Skinner, would make something of a mockery of the sacred principle of products and services competing in the marketplace.

paying down the information deficit

So, imagine you're a state, and you want to get people to pollute less, but you're also committed to the logic of markets. You can't just go full Soviet Russia and operant-condition your pigeons into pecking the right switch! But you've got to get on top of the problem nonetheless.

This is where the information deficit model (IDM) enters the picture. Originating in medicine, the IDM is the foundation-slab of science communications; the basic idea is that a perceived lack of scientific literacy in the general population can be addressed by concerted and consistent outreach by the scientific community. Or, more plainly: if people don't seem to understand a thing, just keep explaining it as simply as possible in public, and eventually they will.

In the specific case of climate change and emissions reduction, then, the idea was that people will do the right thing if a) they're made aware of why what they're doing is a problem, and b) that alternative and better options are available to them in the market. You may also choose to subsidise those better options, or apply some sort of punitive fee or tax to the "bad" options, because Skinnerean behaviourism dies hard—but you can't do it too much, because this would be blasphemy in the context of neoliberal capitalism! It gets fixed with markets, or it doesn't get fixed.

Now, the sci-comms approach did genuinely help to improve awareness around climate change. I have to remind myself of this on the regular, and it can be well worth returning to potted histories of the early to mid-Noughties, or even to everyday documents and news articles from that era, in order to realise how far we've come since the denial wars. I remember very clearly fighting it out with astroturf trolls in the comment threads of tech blogs circa 2005, and climate stuff was just not regular news; if it was news at all, it was still predominantly in the "some weird cranks are worried about this one thing" framing.

To reiterate: we've come a long way! Surveys suggest that the vast majority of people now recognise that climate change is real, and is a problem, and is anthropogenic. We have sci-comms to thank for that.

But even so, the emissions dial is not moving anywhere near so much as it needs to. Why not?

searching for someone to blame

This is where we start getting to the tension I mentioned at the top of this piece. Among the more thoughtful answers to the question "why aren't we emitting less?" include concepts such as inertia, path-dependency, or autopoesis. Now, these are systems-level answers, conceptual labels for emergent properties—and almost by definition, emergent properties are extremely difficult to intervene in at their own scale.

(Just as an aside: systems thinking is crucial to working with ecosystemic issues in particular, but it becomes just as denatured and useless as "design thinking" when it becomes a sort of handwavium answer to wicked problems. The notion of path-dependency, in particular—in my experience—ends up being more often than not the sort of concept that shuts down any serious engagement with a question; it's the C21st equivalent of "it's just God's will, I suppose". Indeed, it was my enduring frustration with people falling back on path-dependency as, in essence, the default response to the question "why can't we have nice things", that drove me to looking for theories that could take me past that answer.)

Back in our too-much-carbon thought experiment, having identified these system-level emergent properties, you can nonetheless say OK, we're going to try to intervene in this stuff anyway. Attempts at doing so tend to look a lot like state regulation of markets, because that's exactly what they are; I think it reasonable to say that results tend to be mixed at best, though it's reassuring that we do seem to be seeing more attempts. We could get a lot better at this, I suspect, if we had the political guts to give it a serious go. But therein lies the problem: whence those political guts?

So now we arrive at the great false dichotomy of climate politics as presently constituted, which emerges from the not-always-tacit question of who's to blame. In recent years it has become quite commonplace in some spaces of environmental concern to argue that individuals can't be blamed for climate impacts, because they are subject to structural forces that constrain their behavioural options. Now, I agree with this argument—though I would like us to note before continuing that it's a very good fit with the old behaviourist paradigm.

Where people tend to lose me is at the corollary to the previous argument, which concludes that we cannot reasonably expect any lifestyle changes of individuals, and that pretty much all emissions reduction will therefore have to be achieved through the regulation of businesses.

What's my beef, here? For one thing, it's contradictory: assuming we regulate enough to actually make a difference to climate impacts, those lifestyles are gonna change anyway.

(Of course, people making this argument are hoping that their lifestyle will be below the threshold of change in such a situation... but for almost any such person living in the US or Europe in particular, I come bearing bad news, because it won't be. But there's good news, too: the changes will actually make your life more agreeable!)

For another thing, where is the mandate for the political will to legislate and enforce those regulations going to come from, if not from people who are willing to see the lifestyles they're obliged to buy be changed for the better? Because you'd better believe that, unless there's a whole lot of voters drowning them out with the demand that it happens, all our elected representatives are going to hear are the honeyed words of the lobbyists who are paid to argue that it shouldn't.

This is where it gets interesting: because there are, as already discussed, lots of people—and lots of firms, large and small—who know that climate change is real, is a problem, and is anthropogenic, and who want to do things differently in order to contribute less to that problem. But it's hard! Having a list of alternatives turns out to be insufficient to the challenge!

In practical terms, then, if you want to intervene in human impact on the environment, you need a theory which recognises and starts from the foundational premise that you stand almost zero chance of changing the way someone does something until you fully understand why they do it in the way they do. From this pragamatic perspective, then, a practice-based model of change offers a basis from which to begin developing such an understanding—and in the weeks to come, I'll do my best to show you how.

coming to terms with complicity

In political and theoretical terms, a practice-based model of change also offers the opportunity to move away from the binary logic of villains and victims, and toward a recognition that when it comes to systemic issues like climate change, everyone is to some extent both.

Yes, of course, there are those who have done much better out of extractivism and petroculture than others—but, much as I was taught to think of patriarchy, they are in some ways victims of the system as well, warped by the very environment of their privilege.

And yes, of course, there are also those who live lives of desperate poverty among the waste and despoilment of the current system, whose contributions to emissions and other forms of pollution are so small, and so far beyond the realm of conscious decision, so thoroughly channeled by structural constraints, that it rightly feels deeply wrong to hold them even slightly responsible for it.

Nonetheless: to withhold responsibility from someone is to withhold their agency. To insist on the passivity of a victim (and on your undiluted responsibility for rescuing them) is to hold them in the position of victimhood.

Hence the title of this post, a line which I've been using for a long time—particularly with reference to climate change, but also increasingly to other systemic and structural challenges. No one is to blame; because what one person, what one firm or government even, could have assembled this mess deliberately? But everyone is complicit; because there is effectively no outside to the system any more. I might even go so far as to argue that no one currently alive has ever lived outside of the structures in question; we were born complicit, every damned one of us.

(If you want to label this as a sort of secular-systemic remix of original sin, go right ahead. And if you'd like to read a much more extended and academic version of this argument, I humbly direct you to my chapter in the book Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking, which is fully open access and free to download for absolutely anyone.)

So, then: how do you deal with a problem like climate change? How can you even begin to think about changing the way we do things, in a way that recognises both the implacable constraints of the systemic structures in which we live, and the autonomous agency that we nonetheless possess?

You can begin by thinking seriously about why it is that a given person does a given thing in the particular way that they currently do it.

And that's what we'll do next time I return to this theme.