2016 Yearbook

R E V I E W 31 NUDGE THEORY ANDREW McCLELLAND The quality of our historic environment ultimately depends on those who are responsible for its constituent components – the buildings, the spaces between the buildings and the landscape or townscape features. Key decisions affecting its qualities are largely controlled by individuals who live in the community, whether as homeowners, business owners or council members. While heritage professionals can help to raise standards through the projects they are involved in, they can achieve relatively little on their own without engaging with the public. Urban regeneration models have shown, time and again, that people power can be transformative if properly informed and inspired. Key avenues for engaging with the public include traditional media and marketing, social media and the internet. But often perfectly good messages are ignored. Timely maintenance, for example, makes complete sense, so persuading owners to clear out their gutters should be like pushing at an open door, but sometimes the door sticks. Maybe it is a question of the right nudge in the right place… Among policymakers, interest in behavioural economics, social psychology and the use of concepts like ‘nudge theory’ has burgeoned since the 2008 economic crisis. This is partly due to reductions in public funding and hence a desire to explore new ways of doing more with less, but it also reflects a renewed political focus on non-regulatory approaches to interventions aimed at shaping civic behaviour in a range of public policy areas. The publication of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness in 2008 popularised nudging as a policy tool. In 2010 the UK coalition government established the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), colloquially known as the ‘Nudge Unit’, within the Cabinet Office to apply the theory to public policy and services (see www.behaviouralinsights. co.uk ). Backed by political leaders such as David Cameron and Barack Obama, similar initiatives have been undertaken in the US, mainland Europe and elsewhere, indicating widespread interest in innovative approaches to governance in a constrained financial climate. Unsurprisingly for a theory that has gained so much political prominence in such a short space of time, the ideological underpinnings of nudge, the policy implications arising from its adoption, and the lessons from its application in practice are the subject of intense scrutiny, debate and scepticism. In the UK context, nudge has prompted reports by the House of Lords and the British Academy, while the wider academic and policy literature interrogates the theory from every conceivable angle. A primary assumption of nudge is that people often do things that are not in their own best interest, or delay doing things they need to until too late. Through the deployment of behavioural insights it is possible to shape human behaviour to meet identified public and other policy outcomes. Thaler and Sunstein define nudges as ‘any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives’. The term ‘choice architecture’ refers to the design of the environments in which people make choices. According to the 2011 House of Lords report Behaviour Change , choice architecture can relate to the provision of relevant and timely information, changes to the physical environment, changes to the default policy option, and the use of social norms through providing comparative information on what others are doing. Two critical characteristics of nudges are that they are cheap to implement and are voluntary and non-coercive, with people ultimately remaining free to choose their course of action. Easily understood examples of nudges designed to have positive short and long-term health impacts include serving alcohol in smaller A Built Heritage at Risk Northern Ireland leaflet designed to ‘nudge’ building owners and managers towards routine maintenance and early intervention

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