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A new activity was initiated by the Environment Directorate in 2005 to improve the understanding of household consumption patterns and household responses to environmental policies in order to provide guidance to policy-makers.
The project on Household Behaviour and Environmental Policy adopts a comprehensive approach by examining key areas of environmental policy:
- household waste generation and recycling,
- personal transport choices,
- organic food consumption,
- residential energy use.
The project consists of two main phases to be carried out over the period 2005-2008:
As part of the first stage of the project, existing empirical studies were reviewed in the four areas selected for study: waste, transport, food and energy. The results of this work were presented at a Workshop on held 15 16 June 2006, at OECD Headquarters, Paris. A publication presenting the outcome of the workshop is forthcoming.
As a follow-up stage, a household survey covering all four areas examined will be carried out in 2007. It is anticipated that approximately six countries representing different OECD regions would participate in the survey.
The project intends to widen the scope of previous analysis in a number of ways, in particular by:
• Bringing together key aspects necessary to better understand household environment-related behaviour: responses to environmental policy instruments implemented to affect their behaviour, differences across households (e.g. role of income, age, education levels, household size, environmental awareness).
• Examining the effect on households of a broad range of environmental policy instruments in the four areas examined. Measures to be examined for policy guidance include economic instruments (e.g. unit-based fees vs flat fees for waste, energy taxes, congestion charging), information-based instruments (e.g. energy efficiency labels, organic food labelling), direct regulation (e.g. parking restrictions, efficiency standards) and the provision of public services (e.g. drop-off vs. collect recycling schemes, quality of public transport).
• Considering the contributions of economic theory as well as other disciplines such as psychology and sociology which complement each other to provide a more comprehensive picture of household behaviour and response to environmental policies.
• Developing policy implications for the design and implementation of environmental policies targeted at households, drawing from the review of existing evidence available in selected OECD countries as well as the development of a unique international comparative analysis across the four environmental issues addressed.
This new project builds on previous OECD work on sustainable consumption developed since 1994. The activity was initiated with a comprehensive programme combining the development of a conceptual framework for the analysis of the effects of household consumption on the environment, sector case studies documenting trends, environmental impacts, and policy response in five areas of household consumption (food, tourism-related travel, energy, water and waste generation), and policy recommendations to influence household consumption. The results of this work were released as a publication "Towards Sustainable Household Consumption? Trends and Policies in OECD Countries" and a series of free documents.
In addition, work focussing on energy-consuming consumer durables such as motor vehicles or household appliances was undertaken addressing key issues to reduce impacts from durable design, production, use and disposal. A report on the environmental and policy implications of household decisions with respect to consumer durable purchases is available. This reviews some of the challenges facing policy makers as they seek to design environmentally effective and economically efficient environmental policies in this area.
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