Nudging and Other Behaviourally Based Policies as Enablers for Environmental Sustainability

Recent years have shown that traditional regulatory techniques alone are not effective in achieving behaviour change in important fields such as environmental sustainability. Governments all over the world have been progressively including behaviourally informed considerations in policy and law making with the aim of improving the acceptance and impact of sustainability-oriented measures. This led to the arrival of alternative regulatory tools, such as nudges. The effectiveness of nudges for environmental sustainability (green nudges) has been largely reported but the practical and ethical implications are still largely neglected by academic research. In this contribution, “nudges” are conceptually distinguished from “boosts” and their ethical briefly explained. The analysis is made at the light of the current mostly European and US American academic literature.