International and national policies call on private citizens to enact behavioural change across multiple consumption domains covering all areas of life. However, a consumer’s activities are not independent from each other but interact, influence and trade off against each other. Undertaking a certain consumption activity may infect consumption in other domains, also known as spillover effect. This may cut both ways: for instance, eating less meat may encourage a person to take up even more ambitious behaviours like cycling to school, or may be used to justify carbon-intensive consumption like going on holiday by air travel.
Consequently, the SPILLOVER project investigates how behavioural change in one domain may act as a seed for following changes in other domains. Positive and negative spillover effects may play a critical role in estimating the scope of potential behaviour changes. There is wide agreement that cross-activity spillover effects matter; it is less clear, though, where and why spillover emerges between particular behaviours, or, which learning interventions could help consumers gradually rearrange their everyday routines.
SPILLOVER accompanies young Austrians in the constitutive biographical phase before, during and after their final schoolyear, on the one hand collecting detailed longitudinal data how their consumption activities and preferences evolve, and on the other hand co-designing a learning programme ready for upscaling to other schools all over Austria.