From diet and home heating to transport and holiday habits – the way we live, work and play has a climate impact. In Scotland, this means we will not reach our climate goals without significant behaviour change across the population. This was the starting point for our recent roundtable, which gathered behavioural experts and policymakers from across the Scottish Government to ask: how can we make better use of behavioural science in policymaking and re-think how we make policy for people? 

What is behavioural science?

Behavioural science (or ‘behavioural research’) is the study of how people behave and make decisions. Such research seeks to understand what drives people’s actions. It is a multidisciplinary field that examines human behaviour by combining insights from a range of academic disciplines including psychology, sociology, neuroscience, economics and more.

Interventions to change behaviour includes individual, social and material factors. They are a coordinated set of activities designed to change specified behaviour patterns, for example how people get around, or what kind of food they buy and how much of it they throw away. These behaviours don’t happen in isolation, so behaviour change interventions must consider individual factors such as capability and motivation, as well as social factors and the context for the behaviour. Behavioural interventions critically need to remove the barriers to action. 

The Scottish Government have a ‘Climate Behaviours’ team and researchers who support a cross-government ‘Behavioural Insight Network’. The First Minister’s Environment Council recently recommended that the use of behavioural techniques in climate policy should be accelerated. So, we joined forces with Scottish Government colleagues working on climate behaviours to gather behavioural experts and senior policy makers from across the Scottish Government to identify actions that can be implemented now.

Roundtable focus

Specifically, the roundtable discussed three challenges – each time asking, ‘What can we try in the next six months to address this?’: 

  • How can we prioritise action where it is needed most?
  • How can we overcome the challenge of making evidence more accessible and usable, and empower policymakers to use it effectively?
  • How can we better demonstrate the impact of behaviour change through more systematic evaluation?

Prioritising is important to use limited resources most efficiently. There are many behavioural changes needed across policy but some have a greater impact and are more feasible than others. The roundtable suggested that some sectors such as agriculture and land-use, and clean heating need to be a focus. One suggested action is to use a ‘climate impact test’ to rank policy areas and ideas.

However, behavioural insights are no silver bullet and do not always give clear answers to policy challenges, so how can we make behavioural insights easier for policymakers to use? The roundtable suggested a focus on how policymakers and researchers understand each other and are helped to work together. We need to ‘raise the floor’ across the board. 

And finally, we need evidence of what works. It is challenging and resource-intensive to test and track the direct impact of policies on behaviours. This is particularly the case when it comes to the fast-paced and non-linear nature of the policy cycle. It is not uncommon that new priorities emerge before there is time to assess the impact of what is already underway. The roundtable suggested policy should be based on a clear theory of change, and monitoring should ask questions to gather proportionate and useful data about the different elements of the policy. 

What next?

Six proposed actions came out of the roundtable, forming an agenda for the Scottish Government Climate Behaviours team. They will collaborate with and involve Scottish Government colleagues and other roundtable participants as relevant. The roundtable participants will be invited to a follow-up event in spring 2026 to review and reflect on progress. 

Read the report from the roundtable here.

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