Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environment Movement at a Crossroads is an iconoclastic critique of many mainstream approaches to promoting environmental change: approaches which predominated at the time of its publication and are often still clung to today.

It took aim at:

– The “information deficit model” of environmental change, characterised by the conviction that if only enough people knew the facts about the environmental crisis, then there would be mass demand for transformational political change. Weathercocks and Signposts marshalled the evidence from social science that communication of “the facts” will never be enough – because people are more complicated than that.
– The widespread reliance on strategies borrowed from commercial marketing campaigns. Whatever the insistence of erstwhile advertising executives who want to apply their commercial insights for some social benefit, “selling” environmental concern is never going to be analogous to selling soap.
– The naive hope, that if people were persuaded to embrace simple and painless behavioural changes (e.g. switching off lights when not needed) then these changes would “spillover” into ever more ambitious commitments to environmental change (e.g. embracing a plant-based diet or stopping flying). While this obviously makes for a politically attractive strategy, there’s little evidence that it will work.

Weathercocks and Signposts outlined an alternative approach (one which Common Cause Foundation has built upon over many years). This alternative approach is rooted in an understanding of people’s values, what shapes these, and how these come to motivate pro-environmental concern.