Ecological Crisis, Sustainability and the Psychosocial Subject
Beyond Behaviour Change

Authors: Matthew Adams



Critiques the ways in which sustainability and behaviour change have to date been framed in mainstream psychology

Explores the social and cultural context in which knowledge and understanding of anthropogenic ecological degradation has arisen

Seeks to understand how a capacity to engage is refracted through embodied experience, relationships, cultural conventions and material arrangements

This book draws on recent developments across a range of perspectives including psychoanalysis, narrative studies, social practice theory, posthumanism and trans-species psychology, to establish a radical psychosocial alternative to mainstream understanding of ‘environmental problems’.  Only by addressing the psychological and social structures maintaining unsustainable societies might we glimpse the possibility of genuinely sustainable future.The challenges posed by the reality of human-caused ‘environmental problems’ are unprecedented.  Understanding how we respond to knowledge of these problems is vital if we are to have a hope of meeting this challenge.  Psychology and the social sciences have been drafted in to further this understanding, and inform interventions encouraging sustainable behaviour. However, to date, much of psychology has appeared happy to tinker with individual behaviour change, or encourage minor modifications in the social environment aimed at ‘nudging’ individual behaviour. As the ecological crisis deepens, it is increasingly recognised that mainstream understandings and interventions are inadequate to the collective threat posed by climate change and related ecological crises.

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