When implementing environmental education and interventions to promote one pro-environmental behavior, it is seldom asked if and how non-target pro-environmental behaviors are affected. The spillover effect proposes that engaging in one behavior affects the probability of engagement or disengaging in a second behavior. Therefore, the positive spillover effect predicts that interventions targeting one specific behavioral have the capacity to promote non-targeted and/or future pro-environmental behaviors. However, the negative spillover effect predicts that engaging in a first pro-environmental behavior will prevent or decrease a second pro-environmental behavior. Since the theoretical and empirical basis for positive and negative spillover effects are not sufficiently understood, the present paper (1) suggests a distinction between behavioral, temporal, and contextual spillovers (2) reviews the existing spillover research literature across a variety of environmental domains, (3) presents potential moderators governing the direction of spillover effects, and finally (4) discuss techniques to promote pro-environmental spillovers.

To facilitate an understanding of why some environmental policies are acceptable to private citizens and why some are not, we review individual factors that influence the acceptability of environmental policy measures. The factors are categorized in demographic factors, such as age and gender, personal factors such as values and ideology, and policy specific beliefs such as perceptions of how fair or effective a policy is. The reviewed studies indicate that demographic factors generally have small effects on acceptability, that ideology seems to be a consistent predictor among personal factors, and that policy specific beliefs may be effective in explaining acceptability but that the relative importance of the specific beliefs may vary between policy contexts. However, we note methodological concerns in the field of environmental policy acceptability that limit the conclusions that can be drawn from reviews or meta-analyses. We end by giving suggestions for how this field can move forward to provide policy makers with more detailed tools on how to design acceptable environmental policies, for example by introducing more experimental designs, and the standardization of targeting factors, as well as acceptability measures and the improved categorizations of policy tools.

The phenomenon of collective action and the origin of collective action problems have been extensively and systematically studied in the social sciences. Yet, while we have substantial knowledge about the factors promoting collective action at the local level, we know far less about how these insights travel to large-scale collective action problems. Such problems, however, are at the heart of humanity’s most pressing challenges, including climate change, large-scale natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, antibiotic resistance due to overconsumption of antibiotics, and pollution. In this paper, we suggest an analytical framework that captures the theoretical understanding of preconditions for large-scale collective action. This analytical framework aims at supporting future empirical analyses of how to cope with and overcome larger-scale collective action problems. More specifically, we (i) define and describe the main characteristics of a large-scale collective action problem and (ii) explain why voluntary and, in particular,spontaneouslarge-scale collective action among individual actors becomes more improbable as the collective action problem becomes larger, thus demanding interventions by an external authority (a third party) for such action to be generated. Based on this, we (iii) outline an analytical framework that illustrates the connection between third-party interventions and large-scale collective action. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.