What We’re Reading at r3.0 (14)
By Bill Baue
I cut my teeth in the sustainability field journalistically, writing 4 articles a week for SocialFunds.com on socially responsible investing (SRI), with a particular focus on shareowner advocacy. One thing that drove me crazy then (and it still does!) was mainstream coverage of proxy voting that reported votes of less than 50% on shareowner resolutions advocating for greater environmental and social responsibility as losses — revealing a fundamental miscomprehension of the actual dynamics at play.
In reality, minority votes (in the 15–30% range) often represented a sufficient groundswell to prompt corporate management teams to implement the proposed measures (rather than continue to expend precious resources fighting against their owners over common sense guidance to act responsibly).
This somewhat mundane example illustrates a tipping point, which Milkoreit et al 2018 defines thus:
“tipping points in general can be defined as the point or threshold at which small quantitative changes in the system trigger a non-linear change process that is driven by system-internal feedback mechanisms and inevitably leads to a qualitatively different state of the system, which is often irreversible. This new state can be distinguished from the original by its fundamentally altered (positive and negative) state-stabilizing feedbacks.”
“This general definition applies both to natural and social phenomena. Here, we focus on the latter,” write Veronica Pizziol & Alessandro Tavoni of the University of Bologna and London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in a June 2024 Nature paper — From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action — that’s the focus of our review here.
Later in the paper, they note that “[o]nce the tipping point is reached, the actions of a minority group trigger a cascade of behavior change that rapidly increases the acceptance of a minority view.”
In particular, they focus on social tipping interventions (STI) — “actions such as policies and nudges aimed at triggering self-reinforcing surges in support … An important specificity of the work on social tipping is thus its focus on deliberate interventions aimed at desirable change. Successful STI intentionally promote contagion with targeted interventions that have the potential to not only instigate change among the target but also among the susceptible untreated population.”
The authors illustrate STI with a nifty graphic of a targeted “kick” that “destabilizes the status quo and drives the system into an alternative stable equilibrium, leading to disproportionate and possibly irreversible changes.”
This example inhabits the intersection between a social tipping point (STP) — a non-linear shift from high- to low-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting behaviors — and an ecological tipping point: namely, the looming phase shift in the earth’s climate regulatory system due to crossing atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration thresholds. The authors illustrate this overlap in another (slightly less nifty) graphic.
“While ETP are predominantly discussed in the natural sciences, the distinction between the two is less pronounced in the social sciences, where many experiments often explore the interaction between social (strategic) behavior and the threat of disasters represented by ETP. Hence, these social science studies (e.g., ref. 55) belong to the intersection between ETP pertaining to climate change and STP related to human behavior.”
The paper also notes the relationship between STI and social norms, but also introduces a nuanced distinction between them:
“While social norm interventions and STI both aim to promote behavior change through social influence, they differ in approach and scope. Norm nudges leverage social norms to encourage individuals to conform to the perceived norms of a community, providing information about others’ behavior or emphasizing social expectations. STI target tipping points within social systems to achieve larger-scale behavioral changes, by mobilizing targeted individuals with the aim to initiate a cascading effect that leads to widespread and persistent adoption of new behaviors or ways of life.”
The authors proceed to cite studies demonstrating experimental evidence of tipping points in social norms (or conventions, as Centola et al 2018 calls them in this now-famous study) as support for STI, kind of backpedaling on the above distinction between STI and social norms they’d just established.
But helpfully, Pizziol & Tavoni spotlight lesser-known empirical studies, which introduce some folds, in particular diversity:
“Other recent studies have challenged some of the findings from earlier research, emphasizing the heterogeneity of individuals in social dynamics and arguing that the assumption of homogeneity might have led to underestimating the critical mass required for tipping. They suggested that the critical mass needed for tipping may vary depending on factors such as the size of the intervention, the target population, and the distribution of preferences within the population.”
Threshold Models (TM) — in which each individual in a potential tipping dyanamic is “characterized by a threshold value — ranging from 0 to 100 — representing the proportion of others who must take a certain action before that individual is motivated to follow suit” — represent another key element introduced in this study. “The weaker an individual’s conviction in changing to the alternative, the higher the share of others needed to trigger the individual’s decision to switch. These models thus build in conformism and the ensuing inertia in abandoning an entrenched norm.”
Weirdly, the paper discusses voluntary GHG emissions disclosure as an example of tipping, but focuses on a much less relevant case of companies drawing on primary data as compared to industry averages, which is a bit of a “so what?” compared to the much more relevant case of companies disclosing emissions in a science-based way (ie compared to normative thresholds, namely the carbon budget.)
The paper helpfully ends with a reality check on the perils, challenges, and limitations of STI, including “premature labeling of social change processes as tipping, as well as lack of evidence for tipping dynamics” (from the important Milkoreit 2023 paper). This is an important caveat contextualizing the promising elements of STI that serves as the paper’s primary focus.
However, the paper neglects to scope back further to consider even more significant perils / challenges / limitations. In particular, the paper’s focus on climate action — and decarbonization in particular — results in a kind of “solutionism” that risks portraying techno-fixes within existing economic system paradigms as sufficient to resolve humanity’s predicament.
Perhaps more problematically, the paper (and the broader community of social tipping advocates — of which we at r3.0 consider ourselves a member) risks serving up hopium, in the sense that long-standing overshoot of ecological systems (and undershoot of social systems) have essentially created lock-ins of collapse dynamics. Pursuing social tipping points is still very much worthwhile, for ameliorating the worst outcomes and building necessary collapse resilience. But the incommensurability between adverse and beneficial tipping points in ecological and social systems results in significant limitations in the degree to which social tipping interventions can function as silver bullets — much as we might wish otherwise…
See previous What We’re Reading reviews on social tipping dynamics here and here.
And the 2024 r3.0 Conference — themed Tipping Points on Tipping Points: Building Necessary Collapse Resilience — will be digging much deeper into the issues addressed in these reviews on 10 & 11 September. You can register to attend this fully online event here.
