Digital applications to encourage responsible consumer behaviour
According to the WBGU (2019a), information about supply chains, about the environmental costs of products (supplied through QR codes), about services or about investment flows could help consumers make sustainable choices. Digital applications — interactivity, games, virtual experience of nature, or citizen science projects run across transnational networks — accordingly offer new opportunities for environmental awareness and for understanding global interdependencies. In the long run this could help build awareness of the need for global cooperation and global environmental policy.
UNEP (2019) identifies the ecological potential of an SDG-oriented digital ecosystem not only in improving the exchange of knowledge1, but also in informing consumer awareness and choice through new techniques for stimulating engagement with data and knowledge, and for raising citizens’ awareness and involvement. Data-driven applications that incentivise behaviour on the basis of automated data analysis could therefore hold considerable instrumental potential for effective administration and governance (Djeffal, 2017)2. “Nudging” technologies built on big data are promoted as “soft tools” for environmental policy (Michalek, Meran, Schwarze and Yildiz, 2015): drawing on the behavioural, cognitive and neurosciences, on psychology and on other disciplines, they make it possible to influence individual behaviour in a minimally invasive but effective way (Ekardt and Wieding; Grafenstein, Hölzel, Irgmaier and Pohle, 2018).
Potential applications of nudging in environmental policy are sometimes regarded as potentially effective complements to existing instruments. These technologies could be used to avoid and overcome decision-making contexts, patterns of perception or behavioural structures that are ecologically harmful — leading consumers, for instance, towards sustainable decisions about the products they buy or the transport they use (Michalek et al., 2015; Ekardt and Wieding; Grafenstein et al., 2018). Nudging technologies also raise serious ethical and legal questions, and political problems that have yet to be resolved.
Digital applications for inclusive, participatory and cooperative governance
Besides providing information, digital technologies can also make active participation in policy-making easier, and so increase its input legitimacy (WBGU, 2019a). The potential of digital technologies is seen specifically in the context of (smart) cities, which should create an atmosphere in which citizens, business and government build a vibrant, sustainable city together (Effing). Their use might centre on instruments for taking part in administrative or parliamentary decisions3.
Popular ideas about the participatory and “empowering” potential of digital technologies do not, however, only suppose that they allow citizens to take part in environmental governance within the formal framework of a participatory budget (WBGU, 2019a) or in planning, but also that they contribute to collaboration by other means. Digital applications might, for example, include opportunities for citizens to gather and contribute individual data, or to “crowdsource” environmental data in citizen science projects, while at the same time providing technologies that let citizens decide what happens to their data. Civic data production in the context of municipal projects or “citizen science” is supposed, for instance, to allow the collaborative design of cities and public spaces (Couldry and Powell, 2014; Gabrys, 2014; Schwerk, Thoms, Rabl and Markl, 2018). Ideas about the cooperative generation, use and exploitation of data pursue the objective of civic empowerment (Zuccardi Merli and Bonollo, 2014) and the political and economic inclusion of citizens.
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 project “DECODE” is testing three different use cases relating to empowerment through digital technologies: the collaborative economy, participatory citizen sensing and open democracy, focusing specifically on how they relate to user communities in two European cities, Amsterdam and Barcelona4.
The project is developing a peer-to-peer technological infrastructure that grants the municipality the relevant rights and administrative sovereignty over digital data. Behavioural and preference data, and data generated by sensors or by machines, will be gathered under the control of the citizens who generate it or of other data producers, and made accessible to local businesses and public-interest actors. It is also supposed to enable a participatory process for deliberating and deciding on the constitution of a “data commons” — that is, a collectively devised and managed socio-technical and legal system that allows the production, governance and use of different kinds of data in order to address society’s challenges. Environmental sustainability is supposed to be one of the central dimensions of a “collaborative economy of the commons” (Calleja López, 2018).
The Horizon 2020 project “smarticipate” involves giving people access to information about their own city in a form they can readily understand, so that they can better support the decision-making process. Residents can also play an active part in verifying and contributing data.
Local governments, in turn, will be able to draw on their residents’ ingenuity and gain valuable ideas. This two-way feedback makes cities more democratic and more dynamic5.
References
- See section 2.5.2.
- See section 2.5.3.
- democracy-app.de
- decodeproject.eu
- smarticipate.eu
By Rebeca Felibert, student on the Master’s in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at CMI Business School.
