Pushing toward systemic change in the Capitalocene: Investigating the efficacy of existing behavior prediction models on individual and collective pro-environmental actions in high school students

Abstract

Environmental education often advocates for individual pro-environmental behavior—which, while beneficial to a degree, fails to match the large scale of today’s capitalism-fueled socio-ecological challenges. Rather, collective action holds promise as a means for the large-scale changes required in the Capitalocene. These actions can take the shape of encouraging group uptake of behaviors (collective non-activist behaviors) or through fostering system change (collective activist behaviors). This study works to understand how well the environmental literacy framework combined with the theory of planned behavior predicts collective environmental behaviors, using North Carolina high school students as a study population. We find that, while these models effectively predict student engagement in individual environmental behaviors (adjusted R² = 0.39), they are less accurate at predicting engagement in collective non-activist behaviors (adjusted R² = 0.17) and collective activist behaviors (adjusted R² = 0.10). Thus, more research and theory-building are needed to understand what drives collective behavior among youth and beyond.

Keywords:

• collective action
• pro-environmental behavior
• youth
• behavioral antecedents
• activism
• behavior change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by North Carolina Sea Grant under project number R/20-ELWD-1 and the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) under an EE 30 Under 30 Changemakers Grant.