PACHELBEL/STAVE: Shining a light on citizens’ everyday environment-related behaviours

The everyday behaviour of citizens is increasingly recognized as an essential consideration in making policies aimed at promoting sustainability work. The PACHELBEL project aimed to make the nature and rationalities of citizens’ environment-related practices visible to policy-makers through a policy-making support tool named STAVE. It is designed to be able to generate rich, grounded data about everyday citizen behaviours in a user-friendly and relatively speedy way. Thus it brokers “indigenous knowledges” between two social worlds, i.e. the sphere of policy-making and the sphere of citizens’ everyday consumption practices. In this chapter we describe the main features of the tool and our experience with trialling it in six European countries. We learned that the tool is very flexible and can potentially be applied across a wide range of policy contexts, as well as promote critical scrutiny of policy-makers’ existing knowledge about citizen behaviours. We also found that policy context plays a strong role on which type and format of knowledge is perceived as evidence viable to legitimize policy action.