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Julie Cook Kitchener Jul 13, 2020 17:36 pm

Hi everyone,

I came across this provocative blog post from PhD fellow Michaela Barnett, in which she discusses the need to move beyond individual behaviours in order to combat the plastic crisis. As many of you know, education is often insufficient to change behaviour. Barnett echoes this, while also stating that we need legislation to hold plastic producers to account. The only thing I disagree with about this article is that it frames individual behaviours and government action via legislation as an EITHER/OR scenario instead of BOTH/AND. In other words, we need BOTH individual behaviour change AND legislation in order to tackle this problem. This begs the question: to what extent should social marketers be involved in advocacy work? I believe we should be heavily involved if we want to make social change happen at the structural level. Check out the article here if you're interested. Enjoy!