The Department for Transport has published a number of think-pieces about behavioural change – worth looking at.

One is structured round Nine Big Questions.  This leads to the conclusion that we lack reliable predictive models for most human behaviour.  Even if we did have good predictive models, the real world is full of confounding variables. This makes government’s ability to change behaviour extremely limited.  But government can ‘market’ desired behaviours – known as ‘social marketing’.

Another piece from the University of the West of England is a useful literature review of evidence for behavioural change from the transport and health sectors.  This includes a succinct guide to the potential of behavioural economics, in respect of which the authors judge it unlikely that there is a large latent body of easy, cheap, hardly noticed initiatives that will have big effects without the need to consider more substantial intervention. The real promise seems rather to help to design the bigger initiatives better, that is to add ‘nudges’ to improve or speed up the effects rather than as a replacement for other interventions.