Thaler and Sunstein popularised nudging through their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. They showed how insights from behavioural economy and psychology could be used to influence people’s behaviour without limiting their freedom of choice by forbidding certain behaviours. A nudge, as they define it, is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler & Sunstein 2008:6). Nudge thinking holds that human rationality is bounded: i.e., people act based on habits and desires rather than rational analysis. Nudging seeks to correct the suboptimal choices that follow from such cognitive limitations, by subtly changing a physical or virtual environment—the “choice architecture”— and thus inviting individuals to choose “the better” option (Thaler & Sunstein 2008). Nudges are designed interventions with the aim to steer an agent’s behaviour by means of targeting their “shallow cognitive processes, rather than preventing or hindering certain choice alternatives to be chosen.” (Kuyer & Gordijn 2023: 2).

Nudging is increasingly used in the field of sustainability, as so-called green nudges (Carlsson et al. 2021; Schubert 2017). Here, nudging is used to encourage people to save energy, reduce garbage and waste, and increase their use of public transport. The strategy is also employed in many countries in the planning and design of houses, neighbourhoods and districts; for example, the British, Dutch and German governments have included it in design standards for public space (Bandsma et al. 2021). Nevertheless, there is a crucial limitation in nudging’s conceptual underpinnings when the strategy is employed in the name of sustainability.

Even if behavioural economy and psychology provide possibilities for understanding aspects of individual behaviour, nudging’s conceptual grounding in these disciplines is insufficient for explaining and facilitating collective action and reflection (see also Jones & Whitehead 2018; Pedwell 2017). Spurred by the urgency of the planetary crisis (IPCC 2023) we argue that it is of importance to see whether nudging can be made more capable of initiating collective reflection and action. While local planning is merely one measure, and a multitude of systemic changes is needed to meet the challenges of environmental degradation and social inequalities, we argue that it is still important to make local planning more attuned to sustainability.

To address nudging’s limitations we draw on, and add to, the recent development of nudge plus (e.g. Banerjee & John 2021; John & Stoker 2019). Nudge plus supplements conventional nudging’s one-sided emphasis on habitual thinking by highlighting the links between unreflective thinking and more reflective thinking. Nudge plus draws renewed attention to the dual-process models that are at the heart of the nudging literature (Kahneman 2011; Stanovich et al. 2000; Thaler & Sunstein 2008). These models posit that fast habitual thinking (called type 1) interacts with reflective thinking (called type 2). Hence, the basic distinction in dual-processing is between two cognitive processes: one that works through intuition and heuristics, and one that is analytical and reflective. These two processes interact in different ways depending on the characteristics of the task at hand (Banerjee & John 2021).

Several studies have found that nudging works better if the nudge targets habitual processes of type 1, combined with prompts for reflection, that is, processes of type 2 (Bradt 2022; Engelen et al. 2018; Visintin et al. 2021).

Nudge plus paves the way for collective action and reflection through nudging, but only focuses on cognitive processes, and has little to offer for understanding the social and material processes at play. We turn to the tradition of pragmatism for help.

Pragmatism provides useful lenses for understanding the links between habit, politics and social transformation (Dewey 1938, 1954). While in nudging experts and policymakers create a choice architecture to prompt behaviour based on expert definitions of sustainable behaviour, pragmatist scholars are interested in the collective development of habituation that can facilitate durable social transformation (Bridge 2020; Pedwell 2017). The approaches are similar in that they both focus on automated or habitual behaviour and favour “environmentally oriented interventions” (Pedwell 2017: 65). There are also fundamental differences, which makes pragmatism an interesting complement to nudging. Pragmatism carries the potential to complement conventional nudging’s reliance on behavioural insights expertise with its emphasis on individual cognitive processes. While nudging presumes expert authority, pragmatism, too, acknowledges its importance. But the pragmatist tradition also holds that other forms of knowledge - experiential, practical and local - are valuable. For this reason, citizens ought to be included in the design, planning and management of the issues and places they care about, alongside interest groups and various kinds of experts. For proponents of pragmatist inquiry, it is by means of local ownership and improved action competence among citizens that social transformation is enabled (Healey 2009).

To investigate the possibility of adding a collective dimension to nudging, we draw on three core ideas in the pragmatist tradition (Bridge 2020; Healey 2009; Pedwell 2017). First, we draw on joint inquiry, which entails forming a group of people concerned with a particular issue to foster a shared understanding and decision-making on how to address the problem collectively. Second, we draw on dissonance, and seek to highlight differences in understanding and values in the joint inquiry, to facilitate the understanding and negotiation of these differences. Third, we use joint experience, and encourage the group to experience the place, by moving around in it, using it, and drawing on all senses to feel what the place is and does.

The development of The Sustainability Walk grew out of previous work, in which members of the research team analysed handbooks of nudging and citizen participation from the point of view of whose knowledge counts in these strategies (Westin & Joosse 2022). A central finding was that neither strategy alone could handle the tension in planning between expertise and local citizen knowledge. Therefore, we wanted to explore whether nudging and participation could be combined by developing The Sustainability Walk, drawing on the strengths of each approach to overcome the tension between expert and citizen knowledge (in a later stage, we turned to pragmatism as a conceptual resource, as described in Section 2.2). We formed a research team consisting of an architect, two researchers, a research assistant and a student. We had high ambitions, but limited resources and time: we wanted not only to draw on a set of theoretical ideas and adopt them in the development of a practically applicable approach, but also envisaged future regular use of the approach in Swedish municipal planning processes.

We identified the tradition of deliberative walks (Lindell & Ehrström 2020) - where citizens together with planners and various kinds of experts deliberate on how to design public spaces by walking around in them - as particularly pertinent for our purposes. Moreover, since members of the team had positive previous experiences of related approaches to planning - of how moving around and physically experiencing a place can stimulate dialogue and create joint understanding among a group of people - we believed the approach would serve our work well.

We probed our networks to identify a few municipalities where trials to develop the approach could potentially be held. In selecting a municipality, we wanted to engage with municipalities willing to try out the approach we were developing and where, ideally, it could be applied in existing planning processes. After discussions with three different municipalities, we selected Municipality A, a small commuting municipality located in proximity to Greater Stockholm. Municipality A has an ambitious policy for both sustainable development and citizen participation and is home to a large-scale urban development project based on a progressive sustainability strategy. Our idea was to embed our trials within that planning process. We discussed the idea of The Sustainability Walk with planners in the municipality, who took an interest in it.

Informed by pragmatist inquiry, our vision was to facilitate sustainability planning through a deliberative walk. More specifically, we wanted to explore the potential of the pragmatist ideas of joint inquiry, dissonance and joint experience. We drafted a set of questions to be at the core of the walk. We came to think of nudging as a lens to understand choice architecture, rather than an expert intervention strategy, that could enable different actors to come together and discuss how a particular physical setting invites certain kinds of behaviour. This evaluative use of nudging opened an avenue for thinking not only about everyday practices, such as biking or recycling, but also for engaging with larger and more contested, value-laden issues, by widening the use of nudging to critically examine what forms of behaviour a particular place fosters from the point of view of sustainability. The preliminary inquiry we developed when preparing for the trial walk was: what is the logic of the place? With this question, we were interested in identifying and exploring what kinds of behaviour a particular place with its physical makeup, its infrastructure, its embedded behavioural prompts encourages and what behaviour it does not encourage with respect to sustainability.

Having prepared a first design of The Sustainability Walk, the team gathered at the city hall in Municipality A to test it. We delineated an area in the close vicinity where many developments had taken place during recent years and new development projects were underway. During our walk we looked at the finalised, ongoing and planned buildings and constructions in the area. We lingered in places, trying to ‘read the place’ and act according to what we felt was the logic of the place. For example: we walked along a designated path traversing a construction site; we used the objects we met; we sat down on benches in a park area; and strolled through a public herbal garden. We also responded to confusing cues that the place gave us: we sat on a misplaced bench; we tried out footpaths leading to nowhere etc. This was how we made use of the idea of joint experience in the first trial. We walked for an hour and a half before returning to the city hall to share and document our observations and reflections.

We felt good about the outcome when it came to applying the idea of nudging as an evaluative concept. It helped us see which kinds of behaviour the place encouraged and discouraged. Our experience of walking reminded us that there is not only (and cannot only be) one logic of a place. Different team members made different assessments of the logic of the place. This strengthened our idea to use The Sustainability Walk to highlight different interpretations. Moreover, we started to use the phrase “hacking the place” (Minutes, 23/11/2021) as a goal for The Sustainability Walk, i.e. to creatively reconsider the use of a place. Beyond understanding the logic of a place from the point of view of sustainability, we were interested in how understanding this logic could also help people to think of improvements to the place.

Sharing our reflections of the walk, one thing stood out: we realised that we were all rather critical of the logic of this place. Notably, we found that the place was mainly geared towards accommodating cars. While we agreed that taking a critical approach to place-making is essential for sustainability purposes, we also realised that we needed to find a way to discuss how the place could be changed to better promote sustainable everyday practices. We decided to adjust the inquiry so that the approach would be designed according to a two-stage model, where participants would first focus on this evaluative dimension of place and then turn towards envisioning how the same place can be changed.

One problem that we encountered was that the broad and vague concept of sustainability, which may encompass different dimensions and issues, did not help much to focus attention during the walk. The team not only brought different ways of understanding what sustainability means but, more importantly, also had different ideas about how the concept of sustainability could best be applied in the approach. We realised that we had to grapple with a tension: while sustainability will necessarily be open for contestation, it must at the same time contain a normative core that bears on the need for the systems change (Connelly 2007; IPCC 2022; Savaget et al. 2019; Thompson 2011). In pragmatism’s terms, we were struggling to identify the appropriate level of dissonance. Moreover, we found that the discussions tended to become abstract and couched in academic and expert jargon, which defied a vital aspect our work, namely, to facilitate the negotiation of non-expert, everyday knowledge and planning expertise. We concluded that we needed to operationalise the sustainability concept and make its meaning clearer, using everyday language.

To sum up, with respect to the core ideas of the pragmatist tradition drawn on in this paper, the first trial walk demonstrated the utility of adopting the approach of a joint inquiry to explore a place. The walk reaffirmed that there will always be different understandings of the logic of a particular place, of what sustainability means, and of how it can best be promoted. It was also clear that having the tools at one’s disposal with which such differences can be negotiated - which allows one to be attentive to moments of dissonance materializing in the inquiry - is vital. Finally, we felt that the idea of a joint experience of a place to enable the participants, as a group, to come into physical contact with and tangibly feel the shapes and textures of the place, allowed us to perceive dimensions that a disembodied, more abstract approach might not have. After the first trial, we continued to develop the approach for additional trials in Municipality A. However, because the municipal administration was worried about the timing of the walks in relation to the policy work in sustainability and participating, we had to postpone trials. In addition, a local conflict emerged about the number of housing units to be built in the area. We realised that it would be difficult, if not impossible to carry out additional trials in Municipality A. Since our project funding was limited, we did not continue The Sustainability Walk in Municipality A.

We then turned to another municipality that we had identified, Municipality B, where we had previously established contacts with municipal planners through other projects. Together with these planners, we identified District 1 in the municipality as suitable for exploring The Sustainability Walk. This district was currently undergoing major developments, underwritten by ambitious municipal goals for sustainability and citizen participation. District 1 is a suburb and characterised by high-rise buildings built during Sweden’s economic boom in the 1960s and 70s. It has a large immigrant population and the Swedish authorities have designated it as a vulnerable area, with low socioeconomic status, high unemployment and relatively high crime rates. The municipality has initiated a series of development activities and social projects in the district, with the aim of stimulating the growth of a dynamic, creative and prosperous district.

Together with the municipal planners, we started to explore potential sites where The Sustainability Walk could be conducted, and to engage local participants through housing companies in the district. While the district seemed suitable for our purposes, we were also concerned that there were many other initiatives going on, leaving little room for the locals to take in a new one. We also suspected that the residents might be more concerned about crime and unemployment than sustainable everyday practices.

We invited a nudging expert at a consultancy firm to join our initiative, to contribute towards creating a more distinct focal point for the nudging expertise, so that we ourselves could better identify instances of tensions between local knowledge and nudging expertise; focusing on realising the pragmatist idea of dissonance as a vehicle for constructive communication.

We decided that we would proceed with the development of the approach in two steps: first, a role play at the site with members of the team; and second, doing the walk with local participants and planners. In preparing the role play, we did a new iteration of the design of the walk. Based on the lessons learned from the previous trial, we phrased the organising inquiry in everyday language. We felt that it was necessary for the walk to not only contain an evaluative component but to also include a forward-looking, visionary component about place development from the point of view of sustainability. Finally, we also made the application of the concept of sustainability more specific, and clarified that sustainability includes both smaller, less controversial changes and more far-reaching systemic changes that require a certain level of dissonance between different perspectives.

We reformulated the approach’s key questions as follows: i) What would I like to do in this place? and ii) What does the place like me to do here? We re-emphasized the idea of joint experience by adding a component that encourages the participants to place small flags at sites they viewed as important and to write evaluative and visionary statements on the flags, translating their emotional and tactile experiences. In this vein, we also included a sequence encouraging the participants to document their answers to the two questions through filming on their mobile phones.

On a cold spring day, we gathered in District 1 and conducted our second trial in the form of a role-play. We divided the roles of facilitator, planner and local residents among the team members. The basic idea was to form a diverse group in which different, if not opposing perspectives on, and values about, sustainability would be represented. We sought to actively stimulate tensions and oppositions so that the role-play could serve as a useful test bed for pragmatist inquiry. The role-play turned out to be an enriching, but also troubling experience. On the one hand, the trial reaffirmed that the design could fruitfully facilitate both evaluation and a development-oriented exploration of place. On the other hand, we felt as if we had parachuted ourselves into an environment in which we were strangers.

This experience made us realise even more, how important it is to include the people living in the area. The risk of reproducing social inequalities and exclusion through physical planning, when you do not know the area nor the inhabitants well, felt very real. But also, we wondered: was it necessary to take up the residents’ time and involve them in the development of an approach that they had not asked for? We also found it awkward to discuss bike stands and benches when the problems in the area were of a different, more serious kind. In pragmatist terms, we were struggling to find the right level of dissonance.

Moreover, we realized that we had to deal with the recurrent problem we had with applying the concept of sustainability. We had not resolved the vagueness issue identified in the previous trial and had yet to find a fruitful way to negotiate the low-hanging fruits of sustainability and the larger, systemic issues.

Following the role-play, we proceeded to prepare for real-world trials in District 1 in cooperation with a group of planners, behavioural insights experts and residents. However, a week before the next walk, one of the municipal planners informed us that there was a conflict between the municipality and one of the housing companies. The company owned most of the housing stock in District 1 and was crucial to have on board to increase the possibility that our development of the approach could be beneficial to the development of the area. The municipal planner advised us to cancel the walk due to this conflict. We decided to end the trials in District 1. The level of dissonance was too high for allowing us to engage constructively with the area.

Now we needed to make haste. We only had a few months of funding left for the project. We moved quickly to find a new location for a trial, but despite being in a hurry, we sought to carefully use the lessons learned in designing the trial. Since one of the main challenges had been a lack of local participation, we decided to contact a local, grassroots transition group first. We were familiar with this group from previous work. The initial conversation with the leader of the group was promising: she was interested in our work and willing to help to prepare the walk. Hence, we settled for District 2, a small community with a couple of thousand residents located some 20 kilometres from the main city.

We prioritized recruiting participants and identifying a suitable site in District 2. We wanted to engage local residents, planners and nudging experts. To reach planners we used our contacts in the municipality and initiated new contacts. A rural development officer joined the group, as the idea was in line with her responsibility to support development in the communities outside the main city. We also enlisted a local collaborative group working with community development.

It was more difficult to involve the municipal planners. There was an ongoing planning process for establishing a new housing area in District 2. The municipality had developed a draft plan and held a consultation meeting to discuss the plan with the residents in District 2. The consultation had been difficult and the locals skeptical. We thought that the responsible planners might want to participate in our work and also join the walk in the area in question. But after having discussed the idea with representatives of the municipality, it turned out that the municipality was unwilling to include the development of the approach at the site, since the consultation meeting had been conflictual. In pragmatist language, they seemed unwilling to allow for dissonance.

Instead, we turned to mapping organizations and individuals in District 2 and came to engage a group representing different associations in the district. We asked the group for suggestions about where to walk and received a list of potential sites. We opted for an area in the Centre, which was an important hub in the residents’ daily lives.

Again, we revised the design of the walk based on the lessons from our work in District 1. We refined the joint inquiry in the following way: i) What does this place encourage us to do? ii) How would we like the place to change in order to encourage us to act in a more sustainable way? We retained the idea of using flags as a means of making the joint experience of sensing, taking in and acting in a particular place more tangible. And, we added a brief introduction on sustainability, to facilitate discussions and reflections about the issue, and make it easier for the participants to relate to it during the walk. A couple of days before the trial date, we were told that the nudging expert could not come, due to sickness in the family. This was a blow to the process and we had to quickly make a new plan. As we had nudging expertise in our team as well, two team members took on the task of participating in the walk in order to contribute with a nudging perspective. Fifteen people - local residents, the rural development officer and our team – participated in the walk. We started The Sustainability Walk with an introduction of the rationale for the walk, including our definition of sustainability, and the steps it involved. Then, the participants introduced themselves and we discussed our expectations for the walk. We divided the participants into two groups, with one facilitator each. During the first, evaluative, step of the walk, participants made sense of the place by reflecting on how they would use it in everyday life. It is worth noting that it was difficult in all groups to stick to the evaluative step. Instead, participants moved quickly towards the second step of the process, focusing on how the place could be developed, bringing up such things as the need for improved parking and revamping the bus stop to shield passengers from the traffic. The facilitators intervened to bring the groups back to the initial evaluative question, but the participants continued to gravitate towards the second step. Interestingly, this dynamic was the reverse of what we had seen in the first trials, in which the participants were mainly concerned with evaluating the place.

During the second step, the participants discussed how they would like to alter the place to stimulate sustainable everyday practices. They documented their suggestions on flags, which they fixed in the ground. The discussions were shaped by the locals’ perspectives and input to a significant extent, and the municipal officer listened and added her knowledge with a view to explaining how the locals’ ideas fitted into the municipal planning system. This willingness on the part of the planner to listen was evident when one of the facilitators asked the municipal officer how she would like to use this place. The officer forwarded the question to one of the locals instead, inviting that person to respond.

Of particular importance from the point of view of pragmatist inquiry was the fact that the participants did not discuss differences and tensions in depth; the level of explicit dissonance was low. Communication between the participants did not continue to the point where different understandings of the place and sustainability challenges were identified, elaborated upon and negotiated. For example, during the reflection session after the walk, one participant pointed out that some of the participants advocated what she identified as “radical changes” to the place, while others mainly wanted to make what she saw as minor improvements. Her statement was met with silence by the other participants. This demonstrated the importance of having at one’s disposal the conceptual and practical tools to facilitate the negotiation of dissonance emerging in joint inquiry. Not only does the existence of different values and understandings of sustainability need to be properly recognized, but there must also be a practical mechanism enabling the accommodation of the breadth of issues and concerns inherent in the field of sustainability, ranging from the nitty-gritty of everyday life (such as bike lanes or recycling facilities) to the systemic. After the walk, we discussed how to go about honing the approach to realise the pragmatist idea of dissonance.

In the trial we saw how pragmatist inquiry could contribute to nudging by adding a dimension about collective action and reflection. Collectively, the walkers developed novel ideas and suggestions for the development of the place, and new connections between the participating civil society organizations and individuals were established. Several participants stated that they had never paid attention to how this area invited or discouraged behaviours. It was also evident that the participants identified opportunities to realize ideas with the help of the organizations that participated. The walk also enabled new contacts and bonds to be formed between the transition group, the community development group, and the municipality.

The trial demonstrated that nudge thinking can help people to understand the influence of their direct surrounding in their everyday practices. Combining this approach to nudging with the idea of pragmatist inquiry, as two active triggers of joint reflection, stimulated the participants, as a group, to critically examine how the built environment encouraged certain behaviours while discouraging others. The joint inquiry provided a platform for articulating local knowledge and for negotiating that knowledge with planning expertise (represented by the rural development officer), facilitating the development of a shared understanding.

The idea to develop nudging by drawing on the resources of the pragmatist tradition was shown to be promising but difficult to incorporate in planning processes, because our municipal contacts were afraid that The Sustainability Walk would feed already existing tensions. The three trial walks suggest that by forming a group for joint inquiry, by recognizing the existence of dissonance and seeking to actively negotiate instances of dissonance in the group, by framing discussions in everyday language, and by stimulating joint experience of place, shared experiences and constructive communication around sustainable place development can be fostered. This creative exploration of nudging, where we stretched its use and meaning to facilitate reflective thinking and collective action, shows that it can be a meaningful lens for people to understand their everyday, as shaped by their surroundings. As such, it can serve as a vehicle for evaluating and critically reflecting on the sustainability of a particular place and on what forms of behaviour the place stimulates. Our trial walks also demonstrated the usefulness of joint experience, moving around and getting a feel for the place as a group, allowing the participants to come in close contact with the place and draw on a broad range of their day-to-day experiences of it. Moreover, we witnessed how the walk helped people connect with other groups in a locality, the municipality and other organisations.

Even so, the walks also revealed several pitfalls when it comes to combining nudging and pragmatism. The municipalities were sometimes hesitant about a sustainability walk being arranged in their “conflictual area”, afraid of increasing tensions. We also noted that the walk served to engage different people with different perspectives and to give voice to them. At the same time, the walk (in its current configuration) is not fit for a deeper discussion about conflicting visions. However, one might also think that the walk might just be a good start for such a local collective process. Sustainability remained difficult to grasp in the walk. We sought to balance applying it in an open way to accommodate for different perspectives, on the one hand, and to acknowledge its normative core pertaining to the need for systemic transformation, on the other hand. This balancing act proved to be difficult, but this is, in all likelihood, to be expected when one deals with a wicked problem such as sustainability. The critical aspect, for any practice geared toward promoting sustainability, is to be conscious of the tension and to design appropriate mechanisms for dealing with dissonance in a constructive fashion.