The phrase “to become everyday” might sound like something becoming dull or mundane. However, rendering sustainable and active modes of mobility more everyday, integrated into ordinary life, is one of the key goals of the CLIMATE NUDGE project. Is this goal dull? Quite the opposite! It offers a fascinating opportunity to explore how, for instance, occasional cycling can evolve into a routinized mode of daily transportation. This question is crucial, as the wide-reaching transformations required by so-called wicked problems like climate change challenge the effectiveness of traditional nudge strategies.
So when you consider, in the morning, whether to commute by car or by bike, what shapes that decision? It might feel like an individual choice based on your assessment of weather, gear, or your schedule. But the fact that cycling is even available or meaningful as a commuting option implies that cycling already exists within your horizon of everyday possibilities. For this choice to become a habitual mode of action, it must be repeated to the point of becoming naturalized and possibly even unnoticeable.
This decision-making situation does not emerge in a vacuum. It is embedded in and enabled by a web of socially established practices: past experiences, transport infrastructure, rhythms of working life, shared meanings, and acquired competencies. In other words, what appears to be a momentary individual decision is actually a performance situated within a broader social practice of cycling.
Social practice theory provides a lens to articulate this complex whole. A social practice is a socially established structured way of doing things that does not rest on individual choice but rather emerges from and is sustained through an organized configuration of people, material arrangements, skills, and cultural meanings. Rather than a unified theory, this is a theoretical perspective that focuses not on individuals, but on the practices themselves.
Social practices such as cycling are composed of interrelations between shared meanings, the material environment, and the competences (skills and know-how) of the practitioner. Action is thus not best understood as stemming from individual rational decisions, but as the enactment of practices that follow their internal logic developed over time. Even if rational arguments support the choice of cycling, driving a car might still feel more “natural” due to surrounding social arrangements, such as workplace dress codes, children’s extracurricular schedules, or the symbolic value attached to cars.
In addition to meanings, materials, and competences, practices are also shaped by their teleoaffective structure: the shared goals, purposes, and affective orientations that organize and guide activity. We never “just” cycle. Rather, we do so in pursuit of ends like exercise, commuting, or running errands. These goals are not solely individual preferences; they are socially shared understandings of what is reasonable, desirable, appropriate, and possible, like taking care of one’s health, participating in wage labor, or navigating a city structured by the spatial distribution of retail services.
This framing is already familiar to behaviorally informed approaches that consider context. The Climate Nudge project has highlighted how complex configurations of social and material arrangements shape our choices. Nudging research has expanded to include perspectives such as Nudge+, which incorporates reflection and change beyond single decision moments. Furthermore, there is increasing recognition of the need for a holistic lens in behavioral science, one that moves beyond individualism toward system-level understanding.
Despite these overlaps, practice-theoretical and behavioral-scientific approaches have largely remained in separate camps, often critiquing one another. In academic discourse, they are frequently seen as incommensurable, one focused on individual decision-making, the other on the structuring dynamics of practices.
Yet in the face of pressing sustainability challenges, leveraging interdisciplinary understanding is essential. That’s why Climate Nudge also explores opportunities to integrate practice-theoretical and behavioral-scientific perspectives. In the final year of the project, the goal is to develop an integrative framework grounded in prior research and practical experimentation. This framework will provide applied tools for designing nudge configurations that target not just momentary decisions, but the structures and teleoaffective orientations of established practices.