Background:

Many sustainability initiatives are successful and produce results that benefit the environment. However, others miss the mark and fail to produce the desired outcome. Past research has typically focused on understanding why initiatives fail, without first considering differences in how they fail.

Focus of the Article:

This manuscript is related to Research and Evaluation—specifically, the social marketing concept it focuses on is evaluating the outcome of sustainability initiatives.

Research Question:

What are the different ways in which sustainability initiatives can fail?

Program Design/Approach:

A multi-day workshop of interdisciplinary behavioral sustainability scholars led to the identification of five systematic differences in how sustainability initiatives can fail, suggesting that failure can take on not only different levels of severity, but different forms altogether. Within this framework, we provide examples of each type of failure.

Importance to the Social Marketing Field:

We argue that diagnosing how instead of just why an initiative fails offers important insights that can reduce the likelihood of future failures—insights that may be missed by a narrow focus on the why behind any given failure.

Recommendations for Research or Practice:

The identification of the different ways in which sustainability initiatives fail can lead to improvements in the design and implementation of behavioral interventions, facilitating successful sustainability outcomes and preventing unintended outcomes. Specific recommendations are discussed for each type of failure.

Limitations:

The examples in our framework are not exhaustive, but are instead intended to be illustrative exemplars of each type of failure. Moreover, as our focus is on how sustainability initiatives fail, we do not attempt to diagnose why particular initiatives fail.

中文翻译：

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了解可持续性倡议如何失败：有效设计干预措施的框架

背景：

许多可持续发展计划都取得了成功，并产生了有益于环境的成果。但是，其他人则错过了评分，无法产生理想的结果。过去的研究通常集中在理解为什么计划失败了，没有首先考虑的差异如何，他们失败。

文章重点：

该手稿与研究与评估有关-具体来说，它关注的社会营销概念正在评估可持续性计划的成果。

研究问题：

可持续性计划失败的不同方式有哪些？

程序设计/方法：

为期多天的跨学科行为可持续性研究者研讨会确定了可持续性计划如何失败的五个系统差异，这表明失败不仅可以具有不同的严重程度，而且可以具有不同的形式。在此框架内，我们提供了每种失败类型的示例。

对社会营销领域的重要性：

我们认为，诊断计划失败的方式而不是原因，可以提供重要的见解，从而可以减少将来失败的可能性-狭focus地关注任何给定失败背后的原因可能会错过这些见解。

研究或实践建议：

确定可持续性计划失败的不同方式可导致行为干预措施的设计和实施得到改善，促进成功的可持续性结果并防止意外结果。针对每种类型的故障，都讨论了具体的建议。

局限性：

我们框架中的示例并非详尽无遗，而是旨在作为每种故障类型的说明性示例。此外，由于我们专注于可持续性计划如何失败，因此我们不会尝试诊断特定计划为何失败。