The paper, published @PNAS, by Vivek et al, titled, ‘Towards achieving persistent behavior change in household water conservation’ is based on a study, which is amongst the first anywhere in the world that demonstrates long-term conservation of water in urban households through behavioural interventions alone.
Vivek, who pursued his doctoral programme in Public Policy at IIMB, is interested in application of behavioural sciences to conservation of the environment. His PhD thesis is in water conservation behaviour in urban households.
Vivek has co-authored with Prof. Kanchan Mukherjee and Prof. Deepak Malghan of IIM Bangalore. Prof. Kanchan Mukherjee led the design of the intervention instrument and the theoretical foundation while Prof. Deepak Malghan led the method of analysis and technical writing.
The findings from this study suggest the plausibility of behavioural pathways to conservation, that are not limited to water use alone but can potentially be applied across sectors and scenarios dealing with environmental sustainability, both with and without presence of price signal, as the experiment ran across price and pre-price stages.
Achieving persistence in conservation behaviour has been a central, but elusive goal in behavioural research. The authors report a field experiment that implemented a habit change intervention in an affluent residential community in urban India. The intervention, which lasted for five weeks, yielded 15-25% reduction in household water consumption. More importantly, the effect lasted for the entire observation period of two years after the intervention was stopped, establishing the potential of using behavioural methods to achieve significant long-term reduction in water consumption. The large size of effects is comparable in size to the effects that follow the introduction of economic interventions such as volumetric pricing. The results are very promising for demand management using behaviour change techniques. Such interventions can be a powerful tool to address growing freshwater scarcity in cities. These findings also expand the scope of behavioural interventions to numerous other settings, such as in the larger environment and resource sectors, without the political and social difficulties associated with price-based policies.
