Behaviour Change Framework

Behavioural insights is the evidence base to help us understand how and why people within a community or setting behave the way that they do.

The Ministry of Transport aims to support travel choices and behaviours as a way of achieving transport outcomes (such as environmental sustainability, inclusive access and healthy and safe people). Investing in behavioural insights will improve our ability to consider people’s capability, motivation and opportunity to use sustainable transport choices such as public transport or active transport (e.g. walking, cycling).

Increasing the use of behavioural insights can help us to design policies that support sustainable changes in behaviour. We need to support people to use sustainable transport modes and to create habits that ensure the long-term use of a sustainable transport system. For example, a critical change is reducing the amount of travel by car. So how can we apply behavioural insights to support this change?

There are two types of behaviours; conscious behaviour that tends to be deliberate and reflective, and unconscious behaviour that tends to be automatic or instinctive. Unconscious behaviour can become ingrained over time, such as the habit of driving to work every day. When an unconscious behaviour becomes the default, it can be resistant to traditional policy measures that tend to target people’s conscious behaviour.

Small changes in transport choices (for example, catching a bus once a week into work) can make a big difference because they break unsustainable habits and can create improved long-term transport outcomes (for example, catching the bus everyday instead of driving into work).

Several tools and frameworks are available to help us develop transport policy interventions that account for behavioural biases, defaults and shortcuts.

The Ministry of Transport conducts regular surveys of the householders’ travel patterns to identify trends and changes. While we are still working through the challenges associated with face-to-face surveys post COVID-19, there are opportunities to further improve the survey so we can better understand how, when, where and why people travel in New Zealand. We’re developing more tools to understand how transport policy affects different segments of New Zealand’s population.

The Ministry has developed a systems-view behaviour change framework that can be applied across the transport sector, and across government ministries and agencies. This framework considers a range of system factors which influence people’s capability, motivation and opportunity to change. This system level approach seeks to achieve meaningful and long-term changes in behaviour