Impacting Community Sustainability through Behavior Change: A Research Framework

Abstract

The need for “sustainability” has encouraged a variety of disciplines to consider ways to reduce the impact of a given community on the environment around it. Approaches can range from changing the behavior of a few people to completely restructuring the communities in which people live. Interventions in the larger system of a community provide potential for larger levels of change. How to do this has yet to be fully evaluated, especially from the perspective of people’s behavior interacting within a community environment. The behavior analysis literature provides many individual level interventions, such as contingency management programs and empirically evaluated “kernels” (Embry & Biglan, 2008) across various populations and behaviors. The current paper argues that these provide a starting point for working with other sciences to change the environment, impact the cultural practices of people in the community, and promote sustainability. An overview of the current literature is provided along with various models for application of these interventions to larger communities.