Public Relations and Sustainability

Hello fine informed fellows,

To E.M. Wilkinson I found this might be useful, massive collection of campaigns collated by UNEP.

http://www.unep.fr/pc/sustain/advertising/ads.htm

And in response to Samantha I am a PR student who is educating myself on behaviour change toward sustainability. I found this psychology book of interest,

Osbaldiston, Kennon & Sheldon. 2002.(Ch3) Social Dilemmas and Sustainability: Promoting Peoples Motivation to Cooperate with the Future. In Psychology of Sustainable Development, edited by Schmuck, P & Schultz, W. 2002. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

They talk about the self and relation to nature, among other things. Funny, because when I was about 20 I remember saying all politicians should be made to go on an outdoor, back-to-nature camp to remember from where they came and reconnect, this book theorised my thoughts. Also for public relations,

The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility.. 2007. Eds. May, Cheney & Roper. Oxford University Press.

Also a number of British Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications agencies have guides published on their websites, like

www.econtext.co.uk

and Futerra- http://www.futerracom.org/auto.php?inc=ov&site_cat=12&site_sub=0&case=0

I have just written an essay on ways PR and the net are being used to further CSR and sustainability. I looked at the Tell Shell Forum etc etc. What area of PR theory are you interested in applying Samantha? I can help by brainstorming more specifically if you want more leads. I find public information campaign and social marketing principles are useful in designing messages to target Awareness (cognitive), Acceptance (affective) and Action (behavioural) objectives (Smith, R. D. 2002. Strategic Planning for Public Relations. Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates). Also establishing whats in it for the target publics and identifying barriers. Other study areas I found relevant are salience, obtrusiveness and fear campaign theories. Im still going to look at Edward Bernays (Freuds influential nephew) early work and see if I can make good of it.

PS. Century of the Self is an interesting doco, available online, which discusses persuasion.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174

and The Persuaders, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/.

Cheers, I love this forum, thanks for the nappy tips earlier.
Jemma Howe

Murdoch University,
BA Mass Communication student
Perth, Western Australia

Samantha and Ellen-

I have come across one article that may be particularly helpful. If you do a search on GoggleScholar using the key words Cialdini and environment, the first article that comes up is "Creating Normative Messages to Protect the Environment" from 2003. Some of Cialdini's other work may also be of interest to you. Specific to water conservation, there is a Lapinski article on water conservation attitudes and behaviors that can also be found on GoogleScholar. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of recent work (at least that I've found so far) relating specifically to environmental campaigns. I do know of a couple people doing work relating to global warming, so there may be several articles coming out in the next few years.

Best,
Angela

Graduate Student
School of Communication
The Ohio State University