Common Cause: Report argues that communication campaigns should strengthen our values

Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values: In confronting the profound challenges of our times, civil society organizations can find common cause in working to activate and strengthen a set of helpful 'intrinsic' values, while working to diminish the importance of unhelpful 'extrinsic' values.

The report, authored by Tom Crompton and published in September 2010 by WWF-UK in partnership with Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Oxfam argues that:

• We are confronting profound challenges
• Our dominant model of human decision-making needs updating
• Values and behaviour are intimately connected
• Values can be strengthened culturally
• An understanding of values must be incorporated into civil society campaigns
• Frames offer a vehicle for promoting values
• Deploying an understanding of frames raises profound ethical issues
• Examples of frames that may be important in tackling bigger-than-self problems

It states that civil society organizations should develop an explicit awareness of the values that their campaigns serve to activate and therefore strengthen. It provides a set of eight principles for civil society organizations to consider adopting in the course of responding to an understanding of values and the frames that help to strengthen these.

For practitioners interested in tackling problems as complex as behavior change and climate change, there is certainly food for thought in this report.