Mind the gap! Understanding pro-environmental attitude-behavior gaps as environmental privilege

Extensive research tries to understand the environmental attitude-behavior/value-action gap – why pro-environmental attitudes rarely translate into actual pro-environmental behavior. It offers a wide range of explanations, but rarely takes a wider perspective on social power and inequalities. Yet, critical scholarship claims that dominant understandings of who and what is considered “sustainable” and “eco-friendly” is imbued with class, race and gender biases. While environmental awareness and practices have historically been considered low-status, largely advocated by women and indigenous groups, the individualization and neoliberalization of environmental problems, particularly in relation to climate change, have re-configured pro-environmentalism as high-status and as an expression of high cultural capital. As such, privileged groups, commonly well-educated urban middleclass groups, are constructed as the most eco-friendly, even though they tend to lead the most resource-intensive lifestyles. This study integrates these critical perspectives to research on the attitude-behavior gap. It analyzes how discrepancies between pro-environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behaviors vary between different socioeconomic/sociodemographic groups in the Swedish population. It shows that high income, high education, Swedish citizenship and male gender not only correlate with less pro-environmental behavior, but also with larger attitude-behavior gaps. The study develops the term environmental privilege to demonstrate how these gaps are connected to other forms of socioeconomic inequalities, enabling the already privileged groups of society to say one thing but do another. Besides contributing empirically, the study makes a theoretical contribution by integrating critical perspectives to research on the attitude-behavior gap and by developing the concept of environmental privilege.