Abstract
The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.
Highlights
The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system
In this paper we argue that COVID-19 and at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592721003054 change (ACC) are part of an emerging class of collective action problems marked by features that go beyond the literature’s original insights
For collective action problems such as ACC or COVID-19, we argue there is an urgent need to bring norm theory to bear on policies to promote individual behavior changes, even once a state has agreed to address the issue based on international pressure that may well include a normative element
Summary
Individuals are not alert or sensitive to everyone, but are extremely responsive to the group membership, status, and social identity of those other people from whom they obtain information and to whom they conform when calibrating their own assessments, decisions, and behaviors This nuance, we argue, is a key barrier that has made governance challenges posed in hyper-politicized contexts so difficult to address, even with the use of social norms. Addressing a pandemic like COVID-19 requires at least short-term changes to foundational social behaviors, from social interactions and movement to basic dress and appearance and even medical intervention Motivating and enforcing these behavior changes across the vast majority of a diverse population is a tremendous governance challenge.
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