Guide to promoting water sensitive behaviours

Why change behaviour?

Communities have a strong role to play in the transition to water sensitive cities. There are many behaviours that communities can adopt –in the home, or in their communities – that can facilitate the diverse water sensitive outcomes.

Approach to behaviour change

It is important to choose a specific behaviour that has meaningful environmental impact, and is acceptable to communities.

The next step is understanding factors that influence this behaviour. This can help to identify ‘footholds’ for intervention, and understand what barriers may limit uptake of water sensitive behaviours. These factors may influence knowledge about the issue, attitudes towards to issue or the behaviour, or contextual factors such as cost or ease of adopting the behaviour.

It is also important to identify how to assess whether your behaviour change intervention has been effective. Evaluation criteria may assess the number of people adopting the behaviour. Evaluations may also assess intermediate outcomes, such as change in issue awareness, or end-stage goals such as changed environmental outcomes.